


love is for losers

by jetstars



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Discussions of Suicide, F/F, Homophobia, Suicide mention, fight me stephen i fixed ur whole goddamn coke book, general childhood trauma yknow as you do, genuinely just a chapter 2 rewrite, lesbian reddie because i'm a lesbian and i can, the fix (most of) It fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-06
Updated: 2020-01-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:48:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 48,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22140553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jetstars/pseuds/jetstars
Summary: Edith Ann Kaspbrak was a Virgo, a germaphobe, never broke a bone- except for the time that she did- and fucking hated it when Richie smoked. She had two fanny packs, one for her inhaler and her medicine, and one for her bifocals and her emergency backup inhaler, and probably would have had the entire CDC memorized verbatim had the internet been accessible when they were kids. She was a walking first aid kit, which definitely saved their asses many times as kids, but Richie can’t really remember why. She was paranoid, defensive, and permanently fed up with every single thing Richie Tozier had ever said or done.“Eddie Spaghetti,” Richie whispers.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 26
Kudos: 132





	love is for losers

**Author's Note:**

> only slightly beta’d we die like. actually we don’t this time

If you ever ask Rachel Tozier how she’s doing, she’ll say, “Please, call me Richie.” If you’re her manager, she’ll tell you to go fuck yourself. 

Nine times out of ten, that would be the extent of the conversation, because Richie Tozier is especially good at two things- telling people to call her Richie, and deflecting.

“My little sister couldn’t say my name when she was really little,” Richie says. “Something about the a sound, it always came out like ‘Richel’, like a piss drunk British asshole was trying to say ‘Richard’. And then that turned into Richie, which I was like, alright, guess that’s sticking for fucking eternity. And it did! My parents hated it though, the name Richie, they said it made me sound like a lesbian. Apparently Richie is a lesbian name.” She pauses. “They were only half right, but you know, it’s the thought that counts.” 

The bit is met with a halfhearted chuckle from her manager, a jackass named Frank who she fucking hates, and is never spoken of again. Richie stopped genuinely trying to get people to enjoy her original comedy a long time ago. Can’t win them all. 

It’s a comfortable, familiar cycle- the shows, the tours, the fucking Netflix special that she’s absolutely, totally, completely chill about and she definitely didn’t scream about for three days straight out of equal parts fear and excitement- Richie finds herself in day after day. And really, who is she to complain about making bank off jokes she doesn’t even have to write?

Sure, she may fucking hate her life, but they don’t pay her to be happy. At the very least, it couldn’t possibly get worse.

Until, of course, it does. 

It’s a Saturday hometown-ish show in Los Angeles to a sold out theater to wrap up a two month tour banking off the hype of her Netflix special. Richie’s had her pre-show panic attack, which is a goddamn ritual at this point, and chugged an entire can of Red Bull because surely that shit is good for anxiety. “Jesus,” she whispers to no one.

“Five minutes,” Frank calls from the hallway.

“Fuck off, I know.”

Her phone buzzes. Frowning, Richie pulls it out of her pocket. 

_Incoming: Derry, Maine_

Shaking, Richie hits answer. Lifts the phone to her ear. “Hello?” _Since when do I sound fucking asthmatic? Am I dying?_

“Richie?”

_Swear._

She blinks. “Uh, yeah. Who’s this?”

“It’s Mike, from Derry.”

“... Mike.” A pause. “Mike.” Her eyebrows rocket up to the top of her forehead. “Hanlon? Mike Hanlon. Right?”

“Yeah!”

“Uh, what’s up?”

“... Richie, you need to come back.”

_Swear, if It isn’t dead._

“Two minutes!” Frank yells.

“Hang on!” Richie shouts at her door. “Sorry,” she says to Mike. “What’s… did something happen?”

A pause. “It… it’s back, Rich. It’s back.”

_If It ever comes back, we’ll come back, too._

Richie swallows hard. “It… what?”

“Please, Richie, we need you to come back to Derry. It’s important.”

“We?”

“The Losers. Remember?”

“I’ll call you back,” Richie mumbles.

“Rich-”

She hangs up. Within seconds her phone has clattered to the floor, and then she’s booking it out of her dressing room and down the hall.

“Finally! Jesus, Rich, it’s almost time-”

“Move,” she wheezes, shoving past Frank and running down the hall. _Where’s the fucking bathroom? Shit. Is that an exit? Can I leave the planet? What the fuck-_

Richie stumbles out of the building, leans over the rail leading to a back alley behind the theater, and fucking vomits onto the street.

“What the fuck, Richie!” she hears Frank shout behind her. “Shit- are you okay? Doesn’t matter. You’re on in thirty seconds, let’s fucking go- someone get her a water?”

“Whiskey.”

Frank’s mouth snaps shut. “Alright. You good?”

 _No I’m fucking not, dumbass._ “Yeah.” 

She’s ushered back into the building and down the hall to the side stage in a complete blur. Someone hands her a glass, and she throws back the drink in one go- burns familiarly, good, nice. Back into the swing of it. Familiar. Hating life. All is well, relatively speaking.

_We’ll come back, too._

Richie Tozier goes on stage and does a show, but fuck if she remembers a single moment. She is, as it happens, an incredible actress. She’s memorized the jokes, the facial tics and movements, the fake snort laughs at not-her-own jokes that make it seem like she’s enjoying herself up there. 

Her mind is in Derry. She can’t even remember what it looks like. 

-

Richie never dreams. Well, supposedly she does dream, because according to her old roommate and only friend in the Hills, everybody dreams- but she never remembers them. Sleep seems to be her only solace from her shitty life aside from alcoholism- so, comparatively, the only healthy coping mechanism she has to her name.

She dreams in vivid detail that night. 

_She’s in a sewer, an honest to god disgusting ass sewer, wading through shitty water and shining a dingy flashlight onto the wet, stony walls around her. Somewhere, a small voice is rattling off the names of a thousand diseases you could catch from whatever the fuck “grey water” is- piss and shit, thanks, Eddie._

_Eddie?_

_“Eddie?” she yells. Her voice is small, too, higher pitched. Younger, she realizes. “Eddie!”_

_Panic starts to take over. She rushes through the water faster, ignoring the faint, muffled yells of other people- other kids, they’re all kids, she thinks- because she has to find Eddie, whoever the fuck that is. “Eddie?!”_

_And then she hears it. It’s a strange voice, not a kid’s voice, not a normal fucking adult voice, or a creepy old person voice. It’s harsh, high pitched and breathy and covers her body in goosebumps, makes her heart fully stop in her chest and restart at a million beats a minute, a voice that’s familiar and wrong and she’ll never, ever really forget-_

**_Beep beep, Richie!_ **

Richie screams herself awake. 

She rockets upright in bed in an instant, grasping helplessly at the cold sheets around her and pulling them close for warmth. She’s cold, she’s freezing cold, shaking and crying under the weight of what she remembers she dreamed- she’s also crying, apparently. Cool. She lays down and curls up on her side and sobs into her pillow, willing her stupid fucking brain to fill in the blanks where there are definitely blanks- obvious, traumatic memory shaped ones. 

_What the fuck was that?_

She’s still crying when she books a one way flight to Maine. 

-

Returning to Derry is, in remarkably few ways, wildly anticlimactic. Richie’s family moved to Bangor her first year of college, so the city is far fresher in her mind’s eye than the outskirts and rural towns scattered elsewhere. Something that feels like dread settles heavy in the pit of her stomach the second she set foot in Bangor International Airport. Maybe it’s just motion sickness. 

She shoots for early, and arrives last at the Derry rental townhouses. Go figure. One bedroom is left on the second floor, nearest to the laundry room and vending machines, so it really could be worse. She dumps her duffel bag onto the bed and stares.

_Beep beep._

She leaves the building in a rush, justifying it to herself with the hot dinner date she has to keep.

It’s dark out by the time she arrives to the Jade Orient, a hole in the wall Chinese restaurant she vaguely remembers visiting at least once as a small kid. When she gets out of the car she’s hit with a wave of nausea, didn’t think she hated flying that much- and then she sees them.

Beverly Marsh is as graceful and tough looking as she was when she was thirteen and could’ve reasonably kicked all of their asses in under a minute without breaking a sweat. Her hair’s a little longer now, and she’s taller- duh- but her eyes are bright and wide and she’s smiling like a picture from Richie’s middle school yearbook that she doesn’t think she actually kept. 

She’s hugging a guy Richie doesn’t recognize, but they both turn to look at her at once and with a dropped jaw it dawns on her that those eyes belong to Ben Hanscom, and jesus fucking christ, why did everyone but her have the glow-up of a fucking lifetime? 

She quickly snaps her mouth shut. “You guys look amazing,” she mumbles. “What the fuck happened to me?”

In an instant Beverly takes just enough strides to wrap her arms around Richie, tight and warm and safer than she’s felt since returning to Maine proper. She remembers that about Bev- she always felt safe. She’d kill a man for you, probably. 

“Good to see you, Richie,” Beverly whispers. 

“You look great,” Ben says, to which Richie rolls her eyes, but as soon as Bev lets her go she lets Ben give her a quick hug, too. 

“Saps. Let’s go eat, I’m fucking starving.” She’s not, but being outside in the cold and in Derry, outside, is making her nauseous. 

They go inside, and a waitress with kind eyes leads them into a reserved room with a huge circular table and seven chairs. Three people stand on the other side of the table, staring at the door as they walk in. 

Richie sees a gong, and naturally, goes to hit it. When she looks up, all eyes are on her. Oh. That does tend to happen when you make loud noises.

“This meeting of the Loser’s Club has officially begun,” she says lamely.

Beverly and Ben are the first to go in, saying hello to everyone, clearly remembering their childhood years a little better than Richie, who is really feeling like a permanent struggle bus in the memory department at this point. The first to approach her she instantly recognizes, however, that voice- “Hey, Rich, glad you could make it.”

“Mike, you fucking menace!” she greets heatlessly, gripping his hand tightly and pulling him into a side hug. “Homeschool! Shit, man, it’s been centuries.”

“It’s been a little less than three decades, catch up.”

Richie looks to the side, locks eyes with a taller dude in a flannel, and she thought she was a gay stereotype- “Holy shit. Bill?”

William Fucking Denbrough opens up his arms and Richie barks a laugh and runs forward, near tackling her friend. “Fuck, man, it’s so good to see you! Holy shit!”

“You too, Trashmouth,” he mutters close to her ear. 

Richie remembers Bill. How she could ever possibly forget her oldest friend, the cute kid she dated for a week in the third grade that made everyone just assume she was fully straight for the better part of her entire life so far, the one who indulged in her hour long rants about video games at ungodly hours of the night and helped her fix her bike when she was fifteen and couldn’t afford new tires.

She distantly thinks he may have punched her one time, but for some reason she never held it against him. With her mouth, she probably deserved it. 

Someone snorts a laugh, and Bill steps out of their way. She’s confused for a second, but then someone she hasn’t seen in around twenty three years, give or take a few weeks, appears from behind Bill and Richie can’t help it- she stares. 

Edith Ann Kaspbrak was a Virgo, a germaphobe, never broke a bone- except for the time that she did- and fucking hated it when Richie smoked. She had two fanny packs, one for her inhaler and her medicine, and one for her bifocals and her emergency backup inhaler, and probably would have had the entire CDC memorized verbatim had the internet been accessible when they were kids. She was a walking first aid kit, which definitely saved their asses many times as kids, but Richie can’t really remember why. She was paranoid, defensive, and permanently fed up with every single thing Richie Tozier had ever said or done. 

“Eddie Spaghetti,” Richie whispers. 

A grin splits across her face at the pained look in her best friend’s eyes. “Seriously? That’s the first thing you say to me after twenty fucking years, are you kidding me? You’re such a idiot, honestly, you haven’t changed at all-”

Richie stumbles forward and wraps her arms tightly around Eddie, holds her close against her chest and squeezes, fully ignoring the petulant, “beep fucking beep, asshole,” she gets for the assault, and beams into Eddie’s shoulder. 

“God, I missed you,” she mumbles.

Eddie’s quiet for a moment. “Yeah. You too, Trashmouth.” Richie can hear the smile in her voice, and she laughs a little, stupidly giddy. 

They all sit and order drinks first and foremost, sharing anecdotal memories and old stories that, once she hears them, immediately click in Richie’s memory like missing puzzle pieces. She nods and laughs and pretends she remembered all along, fully shoves down and ignores the bubbling sickness in her stomach that remembering Derry alone has brought up, like exploring a long-condemned house in search of a monster and being shocked when you find it. 

It’s a lot to process at once, Richie credits herself. That’s got to be it.

It gets a little less scary when they start talking about Where They Are Now. Almost fucking everyone in the group is married.

Richie takes a shot. “Wait, Eddie, you got married?” She’s not positive why she’s horrified at the fact, so she elects to fully ignore that feeling and, hopefully, never ever come back to it.

“Why’s that so fucking funny, dickwad?”

“What, like to a man?”

Eddie frowns at her. “Fuck you.” It’s heatless, but there’s an edge, like she’s genuinely offended. That’s… new, she thinks.

“What about you, Rich? Anyone special?” Bill asks.

Richie gnaws on the inside of her cheek for a moment. “Yeah,” she starts shyly, glancing down at the table, then directly into Eddie’s eyes. “I can’t believe you never heard about this. I’ve been in a very, very serious, committed relationship with your mom-”

“Jesus _fucking_ Christ!” Eddie yells as the table bursts into poorly disguised laughter. “You test me every fucking day!”

“You haven’t seen me every day in decades!”

“The least stressful decades of my life! Honestly!”

Bill, still fucking snort laughing behind his hands, tries again. “Seriously, though.”

“Me, serious? It’s like you don’t even know me.”

“Don’t tell me she had you fooled, thinking she’s an actual Casanova or some bullshit,” Eddie snickers. Richie rolls her eyes. “You always talked way too much shit to be real.”

“Shut up,” Richie laughs. “My shit talk is nothing short of genuine, Eds.”

“Do not call me that.”

“No, there’s isn’t anyone,” Richie admits with a noncommittal shrug. 

Bev smiles at her, not pityingly, but warmly. “All the hot guys in Cali are taken?”

“Eh, not really into guys that much anymore,” she says. 

Then she realizes what she just said, and she shuts her fucking mouth. She must look as horrified as she feels, because Bill instantly puts an arm around her shoulders and squeezes. The table is silent for a long moment. 

“No offense, but I kind of figured that out a long time ago.” 

Instantly Richie shoves him, warming up a little at the small chuckle the whole group gives at that. “Shut the fuck up, asshole, it’s not that I don’t like guys,” she insists. “I’m bisexual or whatever, I just… haven’t dated a guy in a long time.” 

And that’s it. Nobody cares, but in the kind of way that makes Richie’s heart swell with affection and feel more at home in this shitty town than she’s felt since she’s arrived back, and maybe since she left in the first place. Eddie’s quiet, but she tries not to dwell on it. 

“Besides,” Richie continues, “I’m always busy or traveling, I’m like, never at home. Wouldn’t wanna put someone through that shit. 

Ben perks up a little. “That’s right, you tour, yeah? I think I saw your comedy special on Netflix.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, it was good.”

Eddie rolls her eyes. “Of course you’re a comedian.”

“You got a problem?” Richie snorts, brows raised.

“No, by all means, capitalize off your gross humor all you want. Glad you found an outlet for that shit.”

It turns out Bill writes horror novels that Richie vaguely remembers seeing in stores, Bev’s a fucking fashion designer, god, she’s always been leagues cooler than any of them, Ben’s an architect? And unfairly rich, as if being the hottest man alive wasn’t enough.

“I’m a risk analyst,” Eddie says. Richie promptly begins fake snoring. “Oh, fuck you.”

“I’m sorry, was that job invented before fun?”

“You’re such an asshole!”

“Could be worse,” Mike says. “I think Stan’s an accountant.”

The table goes quiet. Richie suddenly feels very small and very, very sick. “Hey, where is he? Stan the Man.”

“Maybe he’s late,” Mike tries. “He lives in Florida now, lots of travelers.”

Beverly looks pale, and somehow sicker than Richie feels. She doesn’t want to know. 

“Wh… why are we here, Mike?” Bill asks- and god damn it, Bill, she doesn’t want to _know_. 

Richie looks to her right, where Eddie looks vaguely panicked. “You know, I threw up when Mike called me,” she deadpans with a forced, pained smile. “Isn’t that weird? I don’t even know why.”

“I got into a car accident,” Eddie whispers to the table. “When I got the call. Fucking totaled the thing.”

Richie stares at her with wide eyes. “Fuck.”

Mike looks around the table, brows knitted firmly together, lips set into a thin, not very reassuring line. “Twenty seven years ago, we took an oath. Remember?”

To Richie’s shock and unsolvable dismay, she does. “The blood pact at the Barrens?”

The table is dead silent. She can distantly hear the soft chatter of the restaurant outside their little hidden away table, outside the closed doors that offer false protection from the town around them, from the thing she doesn’t want to remember most of all. 

“We didn’t kill It,” Mike says.

“The clown,” Eddie whispers. 

_Beep beep, Richie._

Richie’s going to be sick. Again. She knows why now, and it’s the worst part. Things were a lot more convenient for her, personally, when she couldn’t fucking remember what it was about Derry, Maine that gave her full body chills and nightmares and made her physically sick at the mere thought of going back.

“Pennywise.”

_BEEP BEEP!_

The door opens. Richie jumps, smacks her hand to her mouth to keep from screaming at the poor fucking waitress that just walked in on a horrified group of traumatized adults who just had their childhood nightmares reawakened about five seconds ago.

“Fortune cookies?” she says. 

-

The look of absolute resignment on Eddie’s face perfectly encapsulates exactly how Richie feels- too fucking tired and terrified to deal with this shit right now. “Look, I get it- seriously, it’s terrible what’s happening here, but I can’t- I can’t just, I have a life out there and I can’t…” Richie can only nod along in full support, already booking it into the townhouse. She needs a nap, a vodka, and to scream or sob into a pillow for at least an hour, not necessarily in any specific order. 

“We can stop it,” Mike tries to say, but Richie is pointedly fast walking the stretch of parking lot leading to the town house. “I have a plan-”

“I have a plan, get the fuck out of Dodge before this ends worse than one of Bill’s books,” Richie grumbles, turning briefly to survey the group. Mike looks desperate, and it tugs at her heart, but the fear bubbling up along side it is too fucking powerful to even entertain the thought of sticking around. “Who’s with me?”

Eddie raises a sheepish hand. Richie nods.

“Richie, I know you’re scared-”

“Fuck, Mike, can we not discuss our childhood traumas in detail in a fucking parking lot at midnight?” Richie snaps. Mike flinches, and she quiets. 

“I’m going to bed,” she mutters.

Beverly is on the phone, though, so Richie ends up pausing on the front steps to watch nervously. Fuck, she couldn’t even really remember Stanley Uris maybe an hour ago- not that she remembered any of them, as fucking ridiculous as it sounds and feels- but now his face is fresh in her mind, the weird lanky Jewish kid she loved to fucking death, one of the greatest friends she’d ever had. In no world did “couldn’t cut it” promise anything remotely good.

She watches Beverly’s face crumple, watches her lips form the words “in the bathtub” before they echo from the speaker phone, watches Beverly nod numbly and hang up, promptly dropping her phone onto the pavement. 

It’s quiet. It’s cold. Richie pulls her jacket tighter around her middle, shoving her hands into her pockets and squeezing them into fists.

“He killed himself,” Beverly whispers.

She doesn’t even think about it. Richie turns and walks directly into the townhouse, fully ignoring Mike and Bill calling for her, ignoring the hand on her shoulder that attempts to comfort her, ignoring fucking everything, and marches up the stairs into her tiny, shitty bedroom only to throw herself onto the bed face first and burst into tears.

_“I hear the list is longer than my wang.”_

_“That’s not saying much.”_

_“Hey, you don’t know that!”_

_Stanley gives her the single least impressed look Richie’s ever seen in her thirteen years of life, and she can’t help but feel accomplished to be the recipient of such blatant dismay. Eventually she says her goodbyes to Bill and Eddie, and as they bike off in the opposite direction, Stanley hops onto his own and looks Richie in the eyes._

_“You’ll come, right?”_

_“To what, your man ceremony?”_

_Stanley looks incredibly stressed. “Sure.”_

_“Yeah,” she says. “Are girls even allowed?”_

_“Yeah, of course they are.”_

_“But it’s a man thing! It’s a valid question, Stanathan!”_

_The look on Stanley’s face is an indescribable combination of pain and amusement, as if he really can’t decide how he feels about Richie’s bullshit at this point. She grins at him._

_“I’ll be there, just say when!”_

_“I’ll let you know. You’re the best, Richie.”_

“Richie?”

It’s Eddie. She takes a moment to hastily sit up and rub her sleeves over her face, under her eyes where she knows there’s mascara now, way to fucking go. “Yeah?”

“... Can I come in?”

“Do you have to?”

A sigh. “Are you okay, asshole?”

Richie can’t help it. She laughs. “I am now. Come in, or whatever.”

Eddie cracks the door open, as if testing that theory. Richie scrambles to swing her legs over the edge of the bed and face her where she’s sitting as Eddie sneaks in and closes the door behind her. 

“Ben wants me to convince you to stay,” Eddie mumbles, “but honestly, I don’t fucking want to, either, so.” She shrugs, pausing to look carefully over Richie’s face, and the worry lines in her forehead crinkle further. “Hey…”

“Shut up,” Richie croaks, scrubbing under her eyes with the heels over her hands. “Just… just shut up, I don’t-”

“I know.” Eddie sits on the edge of the bed beside Richie and puts a hand on the middle of her back. They freeze there for a moment, Richie cannot breathe to save her life for several seconds, before she immediately shoves that feeling down because honestly, she can only deal with so much at once. Eddie doesn’t say anything else, just wraps her arm around Richie’s shoulders and holds her against her side, leans the side of her head on top of Richie’s. 

“Damn it,” Richie whispers, watery and thin.

“It’s okay, Rich.”

“It’s not okay, cause if I start crying I won’t fucking stop, and that’s bullshit.”

Eddie pulls back just enough to look Richie in her red rimmed, teary eyes. “It’s okay to cry, idiot.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m serious.” 

“I know, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Crying doesn’t have to involve talking.”

Richie shakes her head, quick and sharp, and it nearly sends her glasses flying. Eddie cups her face with both hands to keep her still, and it makes that feeling bubble back up, the one she’s fucking terrified beyond belief to even poke with a fucking stick just to see what it is, so she squeezes her eyes shut and shoves it further down. “I don’t fucking cry around people, okay? It makes me feel so… so fucking small and dumb and weak, like... ” _like I’m thirteen and just realized I like girls but if anyone found that out they’d fucking kill me, not a joke but a literal threat, or I’m seventeen and just got outed to my parents and my dad’s A+ reaction was ‘not in my house,’ or I’m eighteen and right before I finally move out of my parent’s house my mom fucking dies, and I don’t think I ever dealt with any of it, and if I start crying about one trauma now I’ll have to cry about it all and I’m not fucking ready._

“I know,” is all Eddie says. She doesn’t let go, just looks Richie right in the eyes with ones quickly filling up with tears of her own, and Richie can’t, she looks down at her lap and starts to shake. 

“Fuck this,” Richie whispers. “Why does everything terrible always have to happen at once?”

Eddie doesn’t say anything, just wraps her arms around Richie and squeezes hard. Richie buries her face in the crook of Eddie’s neck and shakes.

“I want to go home,” she whimpers. 

“Okay,” Eddie says. 

There’s a heavy pause. Richie swallows, thick and painful. “I don’t know where that is.”

“California?”

Richie snorts. “I fucking hate my life, dude, don’t let the fame and fortune fool you.” 

“I wasn’t fooled.” Eddie draws back finally, crouches in front of Richie where she’s still sat hunched over and pretending she’s not crying in front of someone for the first time since she was potentially a toddler at best. “I’d say you could stay with me, but I fucking hate my life, too.”

Richie snorts, but she doesn’t press for details. “Isn’t there a bar in here somewhere?” she mumbles. “I need a fucking drink.”

-

Richie is on her third shot by the time Beverly drops the bomb that she’s watched them all die in her nightmares for 27 years straight. She’s already pouring a fourth shot when she says, “I need to lie down. Jesus Christ. What the _fuck_?” 

“Right, okay, I’m cutting you off,” Eddie says as she snatches the fourth shot out of Richie’s hand and sets it behind the bar. 

Richie whines. “I was gonna drink that!”

“You’ve had more than enough, fucknuts. Besides, you just said you wanted to go lay down.”

“Could’a had another shot before I did,” she mumbles. Eddie just rolls her eyes.

Richie stumbles- not drunkenly, she insists to Eddie, she’s just fucking exhausted- up the stairs and into her bedroom, immediately falling back onto the bed in the exact position Eddie had found her earlier, minus the crying. She turns her head to one side, adjusts her glasses and looks at the alarm clock on the side table. 12:13 AM. 

_Ugh_.

With a groan, Richie shoves herself out of bed and plops onto the floor to rummage through her duffel bag for sweatpants and a t-shirt. Somehow she makes it to the bathroom to pee and change clothes, finds a makeup wipe and takes two seconds to remove the remains of her weepy mascara, but doesn’t actually bother brushing her teeth, simply drifts back to bed and lays down with a sinister, disgustingly familiar whisper echoing in her head. 

She sets her glasses on the side table and flicks the lamp off, rolls over, and closes her eyes.

There’s a knock at the door. 

Richie groans, but she turns again and flicks the lamp back on, propping herself up on one elbow. “Yeah?”

The door creaks open a little, revealing Eddie. She’s dressed similarly, save for swapping sweatpants with those ridiculous fucking tiny running shorts she used to wear when they were kids. “Can I come in?”

Richie scrubs at her eyes with her free hand, and nods.

Eddie shuffles inside, clicks the door shut behind her, and moves to sit on the edge of Richie’s bed. “I fucking hate being here,” Eddie mumbles. “I hate this town. It’s so stupid, but I… I didn’t want to sleep alone, you know?”

Richie shakes her head. “S’not stupid, probably fucking smart.” With great effort, Richie scoots over to the other side of the bed and pats the space where she was. “Hop in, Spaghetti.”

“Don’t-”

“You love it.”

Eddie makes a face. “Highly fucking debatable.” She crawls into bed anyway. 

Distantly, Richie remembers they used to do this a lot. Sometimes it was at Richie’s old house, the few and far between times Sonia Kaspbrak allowed her daughter to spend the night at a friend’s house, mostly because Maggie Tozier was very good at buttering people up and making Richie look less questionable of a human being than she actually was. A lot of times they’d camp at Bill’s or Stan’s, and just… casually not tell their parents they were staying at a boy’s house. They’d share the inflatable mattress with pillows and sleeping bags and blankets stacked on top, huddle for warmth and giggle at the idiot boys they were friends with as they argued about comic books and who was the strongest until Richie got up just to tackle Bill and assert her dominance. Even when Beverly was absorbed into the Loser’s Club, it was always Eddie and Richie who paired up almost conspiratorially, whispering to each other, telling shitty jokes or complaining that something someone (usually Richie) did was gross. 

Eddie settles into bed next to her like it hasn’t been twenty something years since they last saw each other. “If you throw up on me, I’ll call the police.”

“You really know how to sweet talk a girl.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie laughs, but it’s tense. She’s gripping the comforter with both hands clenched into fists, and Richie may be an idiot, but… 

“You alright?”

“Define alright. Cause I think right now that’s pretty relative, given where the hell we’re at and what the fuck just happened tonight.”

Right. “Right,” Richie echoes dumbly. “I don’t know, I guess… I don’t wanna make you uncomfortable?” Eddie frowns. “You got really quiet at dinner, like, when I… accidentally? Came out? I don’t know, I just… I don’t know.”

Eddie rolls her eyes at that, but she’s smiling under the mock annoyance. “You don’t make me uncomfortable,” she says. Richie shrugs. “Seriously. I guess I just didn’t… know? Although looking back, you did drool over Beverly a lot tonight, so…”

“Shut the fuck up,” Richie cackles, shoving Eddie’s shoulder lightly. 

_Don’t touch the other girls, Richie._

Richie’s face falls. Eddie must notice, because she scoots a little closer and cups her face again, as if she knows the exact panic Richie is falling headfirst into and wants to make it extra difficult to parse through. 

_You don’t want them to find out your little secret, do you?_

“It used that against me,” Richie whispers. “That… you know, that I like girls. It taunted me about it, like if you all found out…”

Without a word, Eddie wraps her arms around Richie and pulls her in close, letting Richie’s head settle against her shoulder, into the crook of her neck, where she breathes deeply and tries not to freak the fuck out because she _knows_ what she’s been repressing and it’s all bubbling up to the surface too fast for her to shove it back down. Eddie holds her, though, completely unaware of the crisis Richie’s suddenly having about her best fucking friend she didn’t even remember she had only hours ago. Eddie holds her, and slowly, Richie remembers how to breathe.

“It knew that would scare you,” Eddie says slowly. “Not that we’d react that way. We don’t give a shit- in, like, the nicest way possible. Like, you’re… you’re Richie. In no universe do the Losers not love Richie Tozier no matter what.” 

Richie tries not to harp on her wording too much, and fails. She swallows hard. “Thanks.” 

“For what, basic human decency?”

“I guess so, yeah.”

Eddie snorts. “You’re welcome, Trashmouth.”

There’s a comfortable silence that settles over them for a long moment. Eddie makes no moves to push Richie away, which she’s immensely grateful for, because she’s far too comfortable to move maybe ever. 

“Rich?”

“Mmm.”

“You said there were no guys.” Richie huffs. “Were there any girls?”

Breathe. Fucking breathe, idiot. “Nah,” she mumbles. “Like… one girl in 2007, and that was it.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah, my life kinda sucks.”

Eddie laughs. “Yeah, well, join the club I guess?”

“Why, trouble in paradise?”

Eddie shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s fine, I guess.” She pauses, rolling onto her back to stare straight up at the ceiling, then runs her hands sluggishly over her face. “My mom died last year.”

Richie pales. “Shit, I’m sorry-”

“Nah, fuck that, I’m over it,” Eddie snorts. She does not, in fact, sound over it, but Richie says nothing. When she finally pulls her hands away from her face, she looks… tired. So much more tired than Richie has seen her look all night, which is saying something given the metric fuck ton of bullshit that had just been dumped onto everyone. “She really fucked me up, huh?” 

“Yeah.” Without thinking, Richie grabs her hand. She nearly regrets the impulse, but Eddie’s tired face softens into something warm and fond, and suddenly her pulse is a little bit more thunderous than it was a second ago. “My mom died in ‘94.”

Eddie’s face falls. “I’m sorry. Your mom was… really nice.”

Richie shrugs. “Yeah. It sucks ‘cause we really didn’t leave off on good terms.” 

_Speaking terms_ , Richie doesn’t say. 

Eddie squeezes her hand. Richie holds onto her tightly, says nothing, has cried far too much for one entire lifetime and doesn’t feel like doing any of it again anytime soon. She falls asleep like that, hand in hand with Eddie, and fully expecting the worst to greet her come morning. 

-

_She’s sitting on the bank of the quarry cross-legged and staring blankly as she tosses rocks into the water and fails to skip any of them. The Losers have already left the clubhouse, but Richie doesn’t feel like going home just yet. Summer is almost over, and the more time she spends in town, the more suffocated she feels._

_Someone sits beside her, and she doesn’t look to see who it is before they start skipping rocks with her, with much better results. “So, you and Eddie?” Stan asks._

_Richie blinks a few times, then looks at Stan like he’s insane. “What?”_

_Stan raises his brows. “C’mon. You’ve been following her around like a lost puppy all summer.” Again, Richie blinks. “You’re the least subtle person I’ve ever met.”_

_“It’s a gift,” she retorts automatically. It’s heatless._

_A distressed sigh is the only reply Stan is willing to grant that._

_“She’s my best friend,” Richie says with a shrug. “Is it weird to want to hang out with your best friend over the summer?”_

_“What am I, chopped liver?”_

_“Yeah,” Richie teases. Stan shoves her lightly at the ribs, making Richie twitch reflexively and bat his hands away. “The slimiest, grossest chopped liver I’ve ever seen.” She adds some theatric gagging noises for color._

_“Fuck you,” Stan laughs._

_They fall quiet after that, sticks and stones laying forgotten in the dirt. Richie scoots back over, closer to Stan, and leans her head against his shoulder. She distantly thinks he’s going to recoil, that she’s crossed a line, but he just leans into it, too. At the beginning of the summer, she would sooner have died than show an ounce of genuine affection for her friends._

_A lot of things have changed since the beginning of the summer._

_“Did you know I had a crush on you last year?”_

_Richie sits bolt upright, and stares at Stan with wide, borderline mortified eyes. “What?”_

_Stan rolls his eyes. “That can’t be shocking.”_

_“I was twelve,” she argues. “Dude, I was pale and gangly and weird.”_

_“You’re still all of those things.”_

_“Fuck you,” she mumbles, but she’s smiling. “Aw, Stanford, that’s so cute! What was it, my sexy shorts? My hilarious jokes?”_

_“You’re the least funny person I know,” Stan deadpans. He’s smiling, too._

_“I call bullshit!”_

_“I don’t know what it was,” Stan continues, fully ignoring her comment. “I just… you’re nice to be around. You’re the weirdest, dumbest, most annoying girl I know, but you’re the nicest, too. Honest.” He shrugs, turning to face the quarry again. Richie feels her face burning, but she ignores it, staring at Stan in something like awe. “I just liked being around you, and I wanted to be around you all the time. I still do, I guess.” A pause. He smirks out at the water. “Wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”_

_“Stan,” she mumbles. Her heart aches with something._

_“This isn’t some kind of love confession, just so we’re clear,” he assures her, nudging her elbow with his. “I just thought you should know.”_

_“Why didn’t you tell me last year?”_

_Stan doesn’t answer right away. There’s silence again, but it’s still not uncomfortable. She doesn’t think, just scoots a little closer and wraps her arm around Stan’s shoulders. He doesn’t push her away._

_“I guess I was scared,” he admits. “You’re my best friend, you know? And I didn’t wanna mess that up because I had some kiddie crush all of a sudden.”_

_“Stan, we are kids.”_

_“That’s… fair, I guess.” He shifts and turns his head enough to look at her directly, eyes kind and serious and far too grown up for his whopping thirteen years of life experience. Her arm falls limply into her lap. “I guess what I’m trying to say is, don’t be like me. If you care about someone, you should tell them. Not wait a whole year cause you’re scared to come off too strong or something.”_

_Richie swallows hard. “It’s not-”_

_“Even if it’s not, you obviously care about her, yeah?” Richie shrugs. “Maybe you should tell her that.”_

_She looks into her lap, fidgeting with the loose threads of her shorts nervously. “Stan, that’s… really gay.”_

_“If you say so.” When she looks back up, Stanley’s gone._

_Richie’s head whips back and forth, searching. That’s not how she remembers this going. Stanley said a lot more nice bullshit than that. Something is very wrong._

_“I guess it is pretty gay to tell a girl you like her.”_

_It’s Stanley’s voice, but… it’s not. It’s not his voice. It’s too breathy and thin, too sinister. Richie scrambles to her feet, wide eyes flickering around the quarry._

_“I know your secret…”_

_She spins around. There, hobbling out of the tall grass, is Stanley- but it’s not Stanley. His head is gray and visibly decaying, like a fucking zombie, eyes glossy and white, skin a sickly green with bloody gashes everywhere. But it’s just his head- there’s no body. In its place there’s eight sharp spider legs carrying him over, stumbling._

_“Your dirty little secret…”_

_“We killed you,” Richie whispers. “We killed It, I fucking hit you in the head with a baseball bat-”_

_“Oh, Richie,” Stanley’s head cackles. That is not his voice. She backs up toward the quarry, feels the cold water hit her calves as the giant spider with her friend’s zombie-head._

_“The fun is just beginning.”_

_The spider scrambles toward her, and Richie dives into the quarry. She starts swimming away frantically- can zombie spiders swim, can she out-swim this thing, will it drown? It’s not long before she loses her breath, but as she tries swimming back up for air- nothing. There’s no surface. The zombified head of her dead friend is only getting closer._

Richie wakes with a scream.

She rockets upright in bed, gasping for breath. She’s cold, she’s freezing- but she’s not wet. 

A nightmare. Two in a fucking row, her new high score. 

Somewhere beside her Eddie blinks awake. “Rich? Richie, what’s wrong?”

“I…” 

Eddie rubs at her eyes and sits up, squinting at her through the dark. The window lets in a tiny bit of light from a street lamp, slanted from the blinds, and it’s enough to see the worry on Eddie’s face. “Hey, what happened?”

“Nightmare,” Richie croaks. Eddie goes quiet, just stares consideringly. “What?”

“I had one, too,” she whispers. 

Richie swallows hard. “I was at the quarry with Stan,” she starts to ramble. “And he disappeared, and then… he was this fucking zombie head with spider legs, and he chased me into the quarry, and then I couldn’t breathe-”

Immediately Eddie wraps her arms around Richie and squeezes. Richie can feel her shaking. She reaches over and holds onto Eddie tightly, palms pressed flat against her back, holding her close. 

“I had the same one,” Eddie mutters. “Kind of. We were at the clubhouse. I couldn’t get the hatch to open.”

“Fuck,” Richie says eloquently. 

Eddie laughs. It’s feeble and short, but it’s there. 

“It knows,” Eddie says. “It fucking knows he’s…”

“Yeah.”

Eddie makes a distressed noise into Richie’s shoulder. “See, that just makes me wanna kill the bastard even more. Reverse psychology or whatever the fuck.”

“That’s some logic.”

When Eddie pulls away, Richie feels cold again. She’s looking at her with familiar fire, though, that signature angry determination. She’s always been this way. “You think we can do it?”

Richie doesn’t answer right away. Studies her face, her infuriated eyes, her teeth sinking nervously into her bottom lip. 

“I don’t think we have a choice,” she says. 

-

How Richie falls asleep after that is beyond her comprehension. By morning she’s good and ready to chalk the whole thing up to one big, terrible fucking nightmare she can leave and forget about (even though she wakes up with Eddie still holding her hand, face smushed into a pillow right beside her, and definitely snoring, but the sound is so soft that it’s more endearing than anything,) but she wakes in Derry, and she remembers everything. Maybe even more than she did the night before.

And that’s just… really not fun to think about. 

The Losers Club hikes the Barrens early that morning- too early, Richie would say, and does say. It should be weird, objectively, that she has the exact layout of this place- the landfill, the woods beyond the Kissing Bridge, the mile or so of the Kenduskeag that runs right through it all, those goddamn sewers- perfectly memorized after two decades and then some of never setting foot in it- forgetting it existed, even- but with the rest of the supernatural bullshit returning to Derry has drudged up into the forefront of Richie’s mind, she’s willing to let it slide for the sake of returning to the only one of two or so places Richie doesn’t absolutely fucking hate here.

Ben stomps around for a moment, muttering, “It should be around-” before promptly falling through the fucking ground. 

Silence. Then a faint, “I’m okay!”

Naturally, Beverly is the first to grab the remains of the little rope ladder and clamber down into the clubhouse. Bill follows, and Mike. Eddie stares at the hole in the ground warily, so Richie shrugs and goes right on down. She hears Eddie grumble something like, “you guys are dangerously stupid,” before following suit. 

The instant Richie’s feet hit the dirty ground she feels smacked in the face with that same nauseous nostalgia she’s been plagued with since the plane landed in Bangor, but it simmers and settles down into a sadness that aches. Everything is the same as they left it- except for the ropes holding up their hammock, which had long since rotted away. Richie crouches beside it and rummages around, finding an old, crumpled and dusty box of comic books. She smiles, small and thin. 

Behind the box she finds a second- faded light blue, still sealed. She pries it out and pulls off the lid. The aching sadness turns sharp. “Hey,” she mumbles.

Turning to the others, she pulls out a shower cap.

_“So we don’t get spiders in our hair when we’re down here.”_

_“Stanley, we’re not afraid of spiders.” Richie glances up at them all from her perch on the hammock, legs crossed with a comic propped in her lap, the spitting image of luxury. “I stand corrected.”_

_Eddie pulls off her cap. Before Richie can nag her about it, she’s shoving Richie’s legs aside and climbing into the hammock opposite her. “Hey, Rich, your ten minutes are up.”_

_“What are you talking about?”_

_“The hammock. Ten minutes each was the rule.”_

_Richie looks around in mock dramatics. “I don’t see any sign.”_

_“Are you really being this way right now? No, no- why would there be a sign if there was a verbal agreement?” Richie grins- there she goes. “I remember you agreeing on the fucking rule!”_

_Then Eddie’s eyebrows rocket up her forehead, and promptly melt into neutral as her face sets into a look that screams pissed off determination. She climbs into the hammock directly on top of Richie’s legs, bracing her arms on the edges as Richie attempts to kick her out._

_“Ten minutes each!”_

_“Ow, motherfucker, I’m sitting here-”_

_“Actually, I think I’m sitting here.”_

_“Can you two shut up for two seconds?” Stanley wonders aloud._

_Richie beams. “Nope!”_

_“I thought so.”_

_They continue to bicker nonsensically, with Richie pretending to try to focus on her comic and Eddie shoving her socked feet in her face, nearly knocking her glasses off at one point. She smacks Eddie’s legs with the rolled up comic, pretending to be annoyed and failing, what with the grin splitting across her face. Eddie looks adorable when she’s infuriated with her._

_“Do you guys think we’ll still be friends, when we’re older?” Stanley asks suddenly._

_Richie sits up a little straighter, frowning. Her comic book lays forgotten in her lap._

_Ben’s frowning, too. “What?”_

_“Why wouldn’t we be?” asks Bill._

_Stanley shakes his head. “Do any of your parents still hang out with their friends from middle school? I mean, things might be different then. We all might be different.”_

_“We’ll always still be friends,” Bill says surely, and Richie believes him. “I don’t think that just goes away because we get older.”_

_Richie fights the urge to look at Eddie, who she can feel burning a stare directly into the side of her head. Instead, she watches as Beverly smiles kindly at Stan and places a gentle hand on his shoulder._

_“Yeah, Stan, come on. You don’t have to be so…_ sad.”

Richie stares at the ground, at the shower cap in her hand. She shoves it into her jacket pocket before she can think about how fucking insane this whole situation is, how physically the gaping hole where her friend should be fucking hurts like a puncture right in the center of her chest. 

“He was old before his time,” Ben mutters.

“Yeah,” Eddie echoes, soft. Richie looks up at her. She looks as winded as Richie feels. “Wonder what he was like all grown up.”

Richie squeezes the shower cap in her pocket. “Probably what he was like as a kid,” she says. She can feel their eyes on her, but can only look pointedly at the dirt floor, physically willing the pain in her chest down and away. “The best.”

And then she feels it. Richie rockets upright, standing and turning to face the dumbass old hammock again, quickly squeezing her eyes tightly shut and praying stray water doesn’t leak from the corners. Okay, moment over. Settle down. Look worried. When she turns, her brows are carefully furrowed. “Alright, Mike. What are we doing here?”

She meets Mike’s gaze, and carefully takes in his equally careful expression. “The ritual, to perform it, requires a sacrifice.”

 _This isn’t gonna be good_ , Richie thinks. 

-

It isn’t good, as it happens- infinitely less so given it’s how she ends up walking down Derry’s Center Street alone, meandering in a haze of regret and fear past buildings she’s remembering in perfect clarity only as she passes them. She distantly thinks All By Myself ought to be playing in the distance for cinematic effect, among other reasons. 

Her feet have already taken her directly to the old arcade before she registers where she’s going. The place is long since closed, given it’s not the fucking 80’s anymore and the market demand for old school video games isn’t exactly skyrocketing. She pushes at the door handle a few times, covering the heel of her hand with her jacket sleeve to avoid the cobwebs. It takes a few shoves, but she manages to bust it open, distantly thinking she may have broken an old lock or something. 

The door swings shut behind her, and _oh_ , she remembers. 

It’s like she’s a little kid again. Her head swims with visions of bright screens, faulty mechanics, the smell of popcorn and sweat and summer clouding her head as she stumbles through the empty room. She sees the token machine and laughs, fucking laughs, and fishes a quarter out of her back pocket, sliding it home for the hell of it. 

To her surprise, a token falls into the little dish at the bottom. She takes it, flips it between her fingers a few times, and shoves it in her pocket next to the shower cap. 

The more she walks, the more she remembers. As her fingers brush the silken material of the cap, she can see Stanley, and she freezes. 

He was always such an awkward little kid. Pale and gangly with a mop of curly hair, the shyest kid she ever knew until you got to know him- then the little fucker didn’t know how to shut up. He got so excited about things, it made little Richie’s heart warm and full (and still does) to hear him ramble about the last adventure book he read, or the game he wanted to play, or some disgusting, deeply troubling news he heard that he straight up genuinely thought was fascinating. He put up with the majority of Richie’s nonsensical babbling about video games. He always accompanied her to the arcade because-

_It’s the only time she’s ever talked to a girl who liked video games. How she managed to convince this kid to actually play one with her is beyond Richie’s comprehension, but she doesn’t dwell, because she’s pretty fucking good. She’s blonde and a little taller than her and laughs when she says something stupid, and it makes her heart melt out of her chest._

_“That was fun,” the girl says. Richie doesn’t even know her fucking name, and she’s already a fucking puddle on the floor. “I should probably head out, though.”_

_Richie hesitates a moment too long. “We could play one more? If you want.”_

_It’s a moment too long, because someone appears behind the girl, and oh, she fucked up. She fucked up big time. “Are you bothering my poor cousin, Tozier?”_

_Eyes wide and humiliated, Richie freezes. The girl just frowns and ducks somewhere behind Henry Bowers and his friends. She tries to open her mouth, but nothing comes out. Fuck. Fuck._

_“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, stupid dyke? I always knew you were just a dumb little fairy.” He grins, and it’s disgusting, it’s fucking sinister with the way he’s walking too close for comfort, slow and dangerous. “You better get the fuck out and never look at her like that again, or I’ll show you what you’re really missing, you little bitch-”_

_Richie doesn’t hear the rest of his rant. She runs for it, turns and stumbles blindly out of the arcade and into the summer heat. She can hear them laughing, calling, taunting. She doesn’t stop running until she can’t hear anything but her own pounding heartbeat and the wheeze of her mute sobs._

Richie squeezes her eyes shut. When she opens them, it’s gone, replaced with cobwebs and silence. Stanley never let her go to the arcade alone after that. It feels like breaking a promise she never made. 

“Wish you were here,” she mumbles to no one. “I sure could use a bodyguard right about now, huh?”

There’s no answer. Richie fast walks out of the building before it hurts too much to breathe, like it doesn’t already.

She walks, and doesn’t stop walking until she realizes she’s made it to the park at the near center of Derry, right off Center Street. A little further and she’d hit the creepy warehouses, the second hand shops, she’s a canal away from the mall and- 

The Kissing Bridge. Richie pales.

_“Did you miss me, Richie?”_

Richie, with a horrified shiver running directly up her spine and pure dread filling her veins until she feels like she might spontaneously combust right there, still manages to jump at that voice. That fucking voice from her dream, nightmare- no, her _memory_. She looks around in a blind panic before her eyes settle on the Paul Bunyan statue- _jesus fucking christ_.

Sitting on Paul Bunyan’s fucking shoulder, is Pennywise.

“Fuck!” Richie shouts. She wants to look around and make sure no stray kids heard her, but her eyes are locked on that fucking… _thing_. Her hand claps over her mouth belatedly. 

“Because I missed you!” the clown sings. It’s sitting on the shoulder of the giant Paul Bunyan she vaguely remembers coming to life and chasing her a near lifetime ago, unfocused eyes darting from side to side- returning to her. “No one wants to play with the clown anymore.”

A part of Richie deeply wants to make a fucking joke out of this, but her vocal cords will not fucking move. She’s completely paralyzed, staring up in abject horror at a thing she’s pretty certain no one but her can see. 

And she’s not even a virgin.

It grins slowly, revealing rows of sharp, rotten teeth. “Play a game with me, would you? How about _Street Fighter_? Oh, yes- you like that one, don’t you?” 

It pulls a massive bunch of bright red balloons out of nowhere, and somehow Richie manages to flinch. 

“Or maybe… _truth or dare!_ ”

“Jesus,” Richie whispers.

And then It jumps. Richie stumbles backward instinctively, uselessly, as It soars through the air right in front of her. It’s still fucking talking, the bastard. “Oh, you wouldn’t want anyone to pick truth, would you, Richie? You wouldn’t want anyone to know what you’re _hiding_.”

Not this shit again, she thinks. 

“I know your secret,” It sings, “your dirty little secret. I know your secret- your _dirty little secret!_ ”

Richie is frozen completely where she stands when It lands on the grass right in front of her, glossy eyes boring into her with a burning ferocity that, had she not remembered exactly why she fucking hates Derry, would’ve been an impressive wake up call.

“Should I tell her, Richie?”

Without thinking, she squeezes her eyes shut. “This isn’t happening,” she whispers frantically. That’s how Bill got it to back down when they were kids, right? “This isn’t real. That shit won’t work on me now, I literally just came out to my friends last night, I know they don’t give a shit. Fuck. This really isn’t happening. It isn’t real.”

A pause. She opens her eyes. 

Pennywise has already jumped right in her face, immediately bearing its sickly fangs at her so close she can smell the death and decay built in. It laughs manically, eyes rolling back and forth around in its sockets until Richie screams bloody murder and starts to run. _Fuck this psychological torture bullshit, I’m out of demon clown who eats terrified children for power-town._

_“Come back and play! Come back and play with the clown!”_

-

_Richie runs, and she doesn’t stop running until she realizes she’s midway across the Kissing Bridge. She can’t hear the laughter and the taunting from the arcade out here, can barely hear herself think. She’s gotten beaten up here a few times. Fond memories._

_She braces her palms flat against the side of the bridge and takes a few long, deep breaths. Her eyes scan the names and initials carved haphazardly along the whole of the bridge, some faded and barely legible, others brand new, clear names. She crouches next to a blank spot and wishes she could put a name here._

_No one would care about a few letters, though. Right?_

_She doesn’t let herself think, just pulls out her pocket knife and gets to work, quick. She doesn’t trust the Bowers gang to stay in one place for long, and she’s suffered enough emotional damage for one day. It only takes a minute, and when she’s finished, she takes only a brief second to admire her handiwork._

_R + E_

_She smiles, pockets her knife, and keeps running._

-

"This is fucking insane," Richie yells. She's pacing the hallway now, hands shaking furiously, fully inconsolable. "I can't fucking do this. I'm sorry, I can't do this. I tried! I've remembered every fucking terrible thing this town has done to me, an ancient evil clown from outer space who eats scared kids for power screamed in my face, I'm out."

"Richie, I know-" Mike tries.

If she hadn't been flying off the handle before, she would be now. "You _know_? What exactly do you _know_? I'll tell you what you don't- if this stupid fucking ritual even works! If it worked the first goddamn time, or, you know, at all, we wouldn't be in this mess!"

"They didn't believe it'd work," Mike repeats. Bill rests a hand on Mike's shoulder to calm him- _fuck you, Bill, how can you take his side here_ \- and looks at Richie pleadingly. "I know we can do it, and we can do it right."

" _No_!" Richie shouts. "You don't! You know, coming back has unearthed some pretty unbelievable shit, but this is certifiably insane, Mike!"

"Richie, stop!" Bill cuts in. 

"No! _Fuck_ you, dude!"

Bill shakes his head and steps over to her, grabs her arms and holds her steady right in front of him. She glares at his shoulder. "Look. You're r... right. This is insane. You said it, we're d... dealing with an ancient evil clown from space. That's _insane_ , Richie. N... no one would believe that shit. Don’t you think the only w… way we can stop it w… would probably be insane, too?"

That shuts her up. Her gaze drops to the floor, burning holes in the carpet. Bill doesn't let go. 

"We're all s... scared, Richie."

"I don't want to fucking die in Derry, man," she whispers. "Is that so bad? I don't want to die in this shithole town, is that so fucking much to ask?"

"You won't die."

Richie's head snaps up, and she glares directly at Bill. "You said that last time, and look where that got us. Do _not_ start fucking promising me shit. Not now. Not when one of us is already fucking dead."

Bill doesn't have a retort for that, it seems, because his face falls, and he nods. 

"Richie?" Her eyes squeeze shut at the sound of Mike's voice, much smaller now. "I know. Believe me, I know. He was our friend, too."

Richie nods minutely. Bill's hands disappear from her arms, and when she opens her eyes, Mike is approaching her slowly, like she's a frightened animal. She kind of does feel like a deer in headlights. 

"It got our friend,” Mike continues. “But we can put an end to this. We can make sure It doesn't get anybody else."

"You don't know if it'll even fucking work," she mumbles.

Mike steps up right in front of her. He looks exhausted, deep set dark circles under his eyes, wrinkles marring his forehead where his brows are furrowed together what seems like permanently. "I think it's worth a try," he says. 

She believes him.

Richie swallows hard. She shoves her hands into her pockets, feels the shower cap still stuffed in there, and curls her fingers around it, squeezing. 

"If I die in there," Richie says slowly, looking Mike right in the eyes, "I'll fucking kill you."

Mike tries not to smile. She hears Bill's watery laugh behind him, and the corners of her lips curl upward a little, too. 

"You got it, Rich."

There's a heavy thud upstairs, then frantic footsteps. Beverly appears at the head of the stairs, looking deathly pale. 

"Henry Bowers is in Eddie's bathroom," she whimpers, slurred and frantic. "She’s bleeding."

Richie doesn't think. She runs upstairs. 

-

By the time she makes it upstairs, Bowers has leaped out the window like a fucking maniac and is running down the street cackling. Richie finds Eddie hugging her knees on her bedroom floor with a two-by-two of gauze taped to the side of her face and dried blood at the corner of her mouth.

“You look like hell,” Richie says, like a smart, well adjusted adult human who thinks before she speaks.

Eddie snorts. “Thanks. I feel like it, too.”

Richie shuts the door and sits next to her, leaning back against the door. “Did you find your… thing? Token? Artifact, did Mike call it an artifact? Because that’s… weird.” 

“Yeah,” Eddie mumbles. She reaches into her jacket pocket and pulls out her inhaler, shakes it a little, but does nothing with it. “Time to burn this motherfucker.”

“Wait, really? Don’t you… literally have asthma?” 

“No,” Eddie whispers, bitter and small. “You know what? It’s the stupidest fucking thing. I never had asthma. They were _panic attacks_. It makes me so fucking mad to think about.”

Richie smiles wistfully. “I kind of guessed that, to be honest.”

“And, like, the whole time I had no fucking idea-” She freezes mid sentence, then turns to stare at Richie like she’d just told her the sky is a natural green. “What do you mean, you knew?”

At that, Richie shrugs and looks down, fiddling with her jacket sleeves. “I don’t know. Your mom scared the fucking shit out of me, I can’t imagine what it felt like to be you. Like, I’d definitely have panic attacks like that if it were me.”

She can’t really make out the sweet and sad look that blooms across Eddie’s face when she turns to look at the floor, but she feels it when Eddie grabs her hand and squeezes it tight.

“She was scarier than the fucking clown,” Eddie admits quietly. She doesn’t sound so small anymore, though. “But I think you… and the guys, you know… you made it easier to be brave.”

It takes Richie a moment to calm down her frantic heartbeat, or at the very least try and mask the hitched breath she couldn’t help but desperately suck in. She squeezes Eddie’s hand back. “You were always brave, Eds, didn’t need us for anything.”

“Don’t call me that,” she laughs. It’s fond.

They stay like that for a long moment, sitting alone in a bathroom and holding hands. It feels weirdly like middle school all over again, minus the gratuitous hand holding that Richie didn’t allow herself to dwell on, like they’re taking yet another moment of reprieve from their shitty town and their shitty lives. That hadn’t changed, Richie thinks. 

“So you’re gonna do the… ritual?” Richie asks. 

Eddie doesn’t answer for a moment, just sits there and stares at her inhaler thoughtfully. “Do we really have a choice?” she whispers. 

“... I mean, technically-”

Eddie shakes her head. “I just want to be done with it. Literally. I want to get this shit over with, I’m so fucking tired of that motherfucking clown. If that means we have to burn some symbolic representations of our childhood traumas then I’ll do it. I never wanna deal with It again.”

Richie can’t think of a good, worthwhile response to that, so instead of saying anything she moves to lean the side of her head on top of Eddie’s with a deep sigh. 

The thought pops into her head, and before she can think, it escapes her mouth. “I kind of wish I was as brave as Stan."

She feels it when Eddie runs completely still, blinks a little and wonders why the fuck she said that, but before she can amend it Eddie is turning to sit cross legged and face her directly, glaring daggers into Richie’s eyes. “Do not,” she whispers. It’s less angry than Richie expected. “ _Don’t_. You can’t just…” She looks down at the inhaler in her lap for a second, then back up at Richie, looking distraught. “I need you, Richie. _Here_. I can't do this without you.” 

Richie wants to kiss her. Instead she reaches forward and cups Eddie’s face with both hands, running her thumb back and forth over her good cheekbone. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs. “I don’t know why I said that. I’m scared?” She shakes her head. “I’m not going anywhere, Eds. I fucking swear.”

Eddie leans into her touch, closes her eyes for a brief moment and just breathes. Richie is in love with her so deeply and so irreversibly that it feels like she’s the one with an open stab wound, more heart-centered than Eddie’s head trauma. When Eddie opens her eyes again, she stares. “Swear?”

All Richie can do is nod furiously. Eddie smiles. It’s enough.

There’s a furious knock at the door, so Richie scoots away, leaning her back on the edge of the bed instead. “Yeah?”

The door swings open, revealing a pale, wide eyed Ben. 

“So there’s a problem.”

Eddie groans. “Oh, we’re not going to like this, are we?”

-

Richie belatedly thinks it’s a little foreboding that nobody fucking drove to 29 Neibolt Street. Beverly had already started running, Mike and Ben were hurrying after her, and Eddie and Richie really had no choice but to follow. It’s like they’re kids again, a bunch of thirteen year olds in way over their heads and with no fucking drivers license, except this time Richie just fucking killed a guy, and instead of calling the cops they're all rushing over to kill _another_ guy- well, an ancient evil clown from space, and again. It makes her shudder a little in fear.

Just the way It wants. Perfect. This sucks shit.

They find Bill just as he bounds up the steps to the house that is, beyond fucking reason and belief, still standing. It shouldn’t be as shocking as it feels.

When Bill sees them, he frowns. He looks like he’s been crying, blinks a few times and and starts to shake his head wildly. “It’s my fault you guys are here right now. I started this, I made you guys go down to the Barrens with me.” He looks around at them, and Richie realizes the look on his face is guilt- all consuming, bone crushing guilt. She swallows hard, but there’s a knot holding her throat closed. “All I cared about was finding Georgie. Now, I’m going to go in there, and I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I can’t ask you to do this.” 

There’s silence for a split second. “Well, we’re not asking you, either,” Bev says.

Mike nods. “You didn’t do it alone then, Bill. We’re not going to let you do this alone now.”

 _We’re really fucking doing this_ , Richie thinks with dawning horror. It’s been building up to this, she knows somewhere in the part of her brain that still comprehends logic and reason, every single fucking trauma and terror and bad memory come back to life right in front of them has led them all back to this fucking condemned house again. 

She turns, and there’s Eddie, looking about two feet tall despite the desperate brave mask, the familiar petulant set of her jaw- there’s fear in her eyes, and Richie’s not fooled. Eddie catches her gaze briefly and just nods at her. Richie’s heart crumples.

Ben just shrugs. “Losers stick together.”

Surprisingly, it’s Eddie who speaks up next. “Does… anybody wanna say something?”

Bill forces a tight smile. “R… Richie said it best when we were here last.”

“I did?” Richie frowns, thinking. “... ‘I don’t want to die?’”

Somehow, Bill chokes out a small laugh. “Not that.”

“... That we’re lucky we’re not measuring dicks?”

That gets a real giggle out of Beverly. Eddie visibly grits her teeth to keep from smiling.

“No.”

Again, Richie has to pause. It’s hard, and fucking annoyingly painful, but she replays the memory of twenty seven summers ago in the gross ass sewers. She remembers being pissed. Scared, yeah, but she was actively projecting how pissed she was. Nobody needed to know she was scared. 

_“I told you, Bill. I fucking told you. I don't wanna die. It's your fault. You punched me in the face, you made me walk through shitty water, you dragged me into a fucking crackhead house! And now…” She grabbed a baseball bat out of a stray pile of old kids toys and hoisted it over her shoulder._

“I’m gonna have to kill this fucking clown?”

This time, Bill really smiles. “Yeah.”

Richie beams. “Alright. Let’s kill this fucking clown!”

Bill turns toward the house, and Richie’s enthusiasm dies instantly with it. As alluring as the idea of finally fucking killing It is, that plan requires… killing It. And that requires performing a weird ritual that might not even fucking work. 

The Losers Club enters the house on 29 Neibolt Street without so much as a backward glance. Personally, Richie fears that if she does look back she’ll manage to talk herself out of the whole thing, and even in the haze of fear and the slightest semblance of a survival instinct she still has left, she’s not willing to risk it. Not this time. Richie remembers, and now she has something to lose. Something she’s about to kill a fucking clown to save. 

And if Eddie grabs her forearm and squeezes it for dear life as they walk inside, well. That’s just a friendly reminder. 

-

Richie doesn't exactly panic- rather, she represses every uncomfortable feeling she's ever felt, bottling it up for a rainy day on which the last straw breaks the camel's back, which she supposes is her, and it will all come bubbling up to the surface.

Entering the house on Neibolt Street is that straw, as it happens. Lucky her.

Eddie hasn't let go of her arm yet, and she's grateful. Her soul is about halfway out of her body as it is, giving one last furious attempt to escape Derry, and Eddie clinging is the only anchor keeping it from escaping entirely. She would say that twenty seven years ago she would've complained about it, but she would be lying. 

"I hate this," Eddie whispers, as if it even needs to be said. "This is every fucking nightmare I've had for the past twenty seven years come back to life, and..."

The _we haven't even started the ritual yet_ is heavily implied. Richie wholeheartedly agrees. 

They haven't made it so much as one room into the house before someone screams- _Ben_ , she realizes- and a door slams shut. Immediately Richie spins on her heel and stares. Bill is the first to reach forward and shake the doorknob, which as she predicts, does nothing. "Fuck." Eddie is pale, stark white, bulging eyes locked on the door.

"Ben!" Bill shouts. "Guys!"

"Fuck," Richie repeats with feeling. "Ben-!"

Another thud interrupts her, and the three of them turn again. The refrigerator- ah, the kitchen- shakes. In no world does this turn out well. This cannot be good. 

The refrigerator door swings open, and out rolls... Stanley Uris' fucking zombified head.

“Not again,” Richie groans.

Bill, wide eyed and horrified, rightly so, looks at her. "Again?!"

"This fucker's been in my nightmares," she supplies.

"I told you, Richie," Not-Stanley's Zombie Head says. His glossy eyes roll around briefly, unfocused, before staring right at her. She's going to vomit. "The fun is just beginning."

"Fuck you!" Richie screams. 

It seems to happen in slow motion. Not-Stanley's Zombie Head sprouts eight sharp, gangly spider legs, as zombie heads are apparently wont to do. It wobbles about in the middle of the room for a long moment, as if finding it's sea legs. And then it charges at her. 

Bill, the heroic dumbass, jumps in front of her to catch the blow himself, and it tackles them both to the ground. She screams and kicks at it, sending the head flying across the kitchen, giving them both about two seconds to stand before it's scampering after them again. This time they both jump out of the way, mostly because Richie grabs both of Bill's arms and tugs hard, forcing him to follow her out of the line of fire. 

Then Richie sees it- Eddie's got that fucking iron rod fence post again. "Eddie, kill it!" she yells. "It's not him, just fucking stab it!"

But Eddie doesn't move. She stares at the zombified spider monstrosity that has vaguely taken the shape of their dead friend, wide eyed and jaw nearly to the floor, and she doesn't move. Her hands grip the iron rod for dear life.

" _Eddie_!" Bill screams. The spider charges her this time, and the two of them have a whole second to yank her out of the way. She's still barely moving, they do most of the work, and she's full body shaking. "Y... y... you have to-"

Before Bill can finish, something runs through the back of Not-Stan's head. The motion repeats several times, and as the spider head falls away and scuttles off, Ben comes into view with a rusty old kitchen knife. 

"Shit," Richie mumbles. 

Bill grabs her arms and helps her up from the floor, holding her steady as she wheezes and shakes, then glares daggers at the corner where Eddie is still trembling. “What the fuck, Eddie?! Richie could’ve gotten killed! That wasn’t Stan- he’s d… dead- do you want Richie dead, too?!”

"I'm sorry," Eddie's muttering quietly, over and over. She stares at Bill with horror in her eyes. "Please don’t be mad, Bill, I'm sorry, I don't know what- I'm so fucking sorry-"

"Eddie, breathe,” Richie mumbles.

"I just got so fucking scared, I didn't even-"

Bill grabs Eddie by the shoulders and looks her in the eyes, every trace of anger melting. "Hey, Eddie, listen. It's okay." She looks opposite-convinced. "We're all s... scared. I get it. This-" He lets go of one shoulder to gesture around them vaguely. "Is fucking terrifying. I'm not gonna be mad at you fo… for being scared."

"Yeah, well it could've killed you, or Richie-"

"We’re okay,” Bill says slowly. “You’re okay, too.”

Eddie still looks shaken, and so fucking small, like she's retreating into her skin and hiding away. It breaks parts of Richie's heart she wasn't sure she even had left to be broken. 

"It's okay, Eds," she tries with a tiny smile. 

"We have to keep moving," Mike says. "It's... it's toying with us."

"It's trying to kill us," Eddie whispers.

Mike looks her in the eyes when he says, "Same thing." He isn't wrong.

The Losers make it down to the well in the basement physically in one piece, but it feels as though Richie's mind has fully self destructed at the sight. There's no time for the apprehension simmering in her gut, though, barely time to watch her friends scramble down a rope into the well and follow suit silently, relying on muscle memory to keep her moving. It's exactly as she remembers it, and that's nearly the worst part. Nothing has changed. Not a single fucking thing in Derry has changed since she left, like time hasn’t passed at all since the summer of 1989.

It makes her feel like a helpless little kid again, small and weak and alone, just like she knows It wants.

They drop down into the sewers with a collective moment of disgusted muttering among themselves. Eddie looks about as sick to her stomach as Richie feels. _Grey water_ , she remembers. 

"Gross," is what she says. 

They don't stop. The sewers are long and gross and feel as endless as they look, but they don't stop until they find it. The mountain of kid's toys and clothes is smaller than last time, or maybe it's just decaying. There aren't any kids in sight. Richie shudders.

"Down here," Mike says, climbing onto a wooden platform near the center of the island of children's belongings. He opens a hatch, revealing a long metal ladder even further down into the catacombs of Derry.

"How the fuck is there more sewer?" Richie mutters, staring. 

No one answers her. They don't need to. 

Eddie, wide eyes staring down into the hatch, starts to shake her head violently. "Guys, I can't do it."

"Eds-"

"I can't," she stresses. Her eyes flick up and lock with Richie's, then flicker nervously around the group. She's shaking when her eyes land on Bill. "You saw what happened up there. I was going to let you guys die, I just fucking… froze up. If you let me go down there with you, I’m going to get us all killed."

Then she reaches for her inhaler, and that's when Richie rushes to her side and grabs for it. "Hey, give me that."

"Rich-"

“Stop that, give me-”

“No, just a second, let me-”

"Give it to me, you little turd,” Richie says firmly, and yanks the inhaler away.

Eddie lets go, arms falling limply to her sides. She doesn't quite meet Richie's gaze this time, looks blankly past her shoulder with a far off look of terror. "Listen to me. You had a moment, fine. But who killed a psychotic clown before she was fourteen?"

"... Me."

"Who stabbed Bowers with a knife that she pulled out of her own face?"

"... Also me."

"Who married a man ten times her own body mass?"

Eddie tries not to laugh. It doesn't work. "Me."

"Yeah." Richie reaches forward to cup her cheek, rubbing her thumb over her cheekbone just above the gauze taped there. "You're braver than you think."

She watches Eddie nod a few times, her gaze dropping sheepishly to the ground, looking around at everyone's feet for a moment. "Alright." She spares her one last glance, this time with a weak smile. Better than nothing, Richie thinks. "Thanks, Richie."

Mike leads the way, with Beverly following soon after. She vaguely feels Bill rest a hand on her shoulder and squeeze, and looks up at him with poorly concealed worry. He just nods at her, and she knows. 

It feels like walking into a trap, climbing down that fucking hatch into the sewers under the sewers. The metal is cold and wet and hard to grip, but she drops down onto more solid ground eventually. If hell really did freeze over, Richie thinks this is pretty close to what it would feel like to . 

A trap.

It's less sewer-like down here, and she now thinks maybe "more sewer" was a bad guess. These are honest to god catacombs, actual fucking caves miles below the surface.

 _I'm gonna fucking die down here, aren't I_? Richie thinks. The bile rises in her throat, and she quickly chokes it down as best she can. _I'm gonna fucking die trying to fight a murder clown from space. Fuck. I'm gonna die. That fucking clown is gonna kill us all-_

"Rich?"

She blinks and looks to her right. Eddie. The air rushes violently back into her lungs. "Hmm?"

"You stopped walking."

"Oh." She looks back ahead, and sure enough, they're falling behind a little. Eddie grabs her hand and yanks her forward, picking up the pace. "Shit. Didn't even notice."

"Yeah, I can tell. Not fucking smart to get split up again when we've come this far."

"Right."

They fall in line somewhere behind Ben and Bev. Eddie looks up at her again, this time frowning. "If you die in here, I'll fucking kill you."

"Thanks, Eds."

When they enter the cistern- that is somehow more horrifying than the previous one- Richie loses her breath again. It's huge. But instead of neatly constructed stone work and concrete, the walls are jagged rock. A literal cave. The rocks at the center of the well curve upward in a near perfect circle, and suddenly, the distinct feeling of being trapped returns in full force. 

Eddie squeezes her hand. 

The Losers wade through more gross ass water and make it to that weird circle of unnaturally carved rock, where Mike sets the lantern at the center of their group huddle. "You ready?" he asks.

 _No_ , Richie wants to say. 

One by one, they drop their individual pieces of seven into the lantern- a map of Derry, a paper boat, a page from a middle school yearbook, a poem written on the back of a postcard, an arcade token, an inhaler. Richie pulls a shower cap out of her back pocket and stuffs it in last, distantly thinking that half this shit isn't going to actually burn, and hoping that it still works, or does something, _anything_. Then Mike lights a match and drops it into the lantern.

"Grab hands," Mike says, and they do. Richie hasn't actually let go of Eddie's hand this whole time, but she grabs Bill's and squeezes tightly, looking around at her friends in search of something, anything to grab on to. "It can only be attacked in its true form. That's what the ritual is going to show us."

"What's It's true form?" Ben asks. 

"I hope it's a puppy," Richie blurts out. "A fucking... Pomeranian." 

The Losers, one by one, look at Richie with something in between despair and gratefulness. She nods.

"I'll shut up."

"It's light," Mike says. "Light that has to be snuffed out with darkness." He nods toward the crackling fire within the stone lantern.

The Losers encircle the lantern closer this time, hand in hand. A burst of light from above thunders, and before Richie’s eyes can instinctively turn upward, Mike’s shouting, “Don’t look at it! Repeat after me: _turn light into dark_!”

“Turn light into dark,” Richie echoes. 

The light from above only grows brighter. “Close your eyes!” Mike shouts. Wind picks up and pries at the group, how the fuck is there wind this far below the surface- “Turn light into dark!” 

Their cries become louder and louder as the lights descend- the Deadlights, Richie belatedly realizes, the same lights that once trapped Beverly midair and gave her nightmares for twenty seven fucking years straight, no wonder they're all closing their eyes. The cavern is howling with impossible wind, whipping around them so viciously Richie has to cling with all of the force of will she has left to keep a hold of her friends. She screams the words so loud she can't hear anything, can feel her throat drying and her vocal cords straining painfully, desperately. The lights are blinding even from behind her eyelids as they descend further... and then they're gone. 

"Mike?" she hears Bill ask. "D... did it w... work?"

"Wait," Mike says, voice wobbling. Richie still doesn't open her eyes, just chants and shakes and clings to her friend's hands. The light is gone. "It's in the lantern. Okay. I think..." There's a clinking sound. "... You can open your eyes."

Unfortunately, Richie does. Mike is crouched next to the lantern, has placed a pottery piece on the top of it and is holding it shut. She looks around at her friends faces, takes in their cautious relief, their remaining worry. This feels too good to be true. 

Turns out, it is. 

What little light remained inside the lantern turns red, and pushes against the top where Mike is holding it shut. And it just keeps going. It pushes out against the lantern, filling the space at the center of the Losers' circle, inflating the space like...

A balloon. A _giant fucking red balloon_.

Dread sinks heavy in Richie's bones, weighing her down as she stumbles backward and out of the center of the cistern. The balloon only grows and grows, pushing the Losers out to the walls, separating them- "Eddie?" she yells. "Eddie!"

" _Richie_!"

Richie wades through the water in a hurry, following Eddie's voice until she sees her leaned up against an outcropping of rock, clinging to it and staring in horror at the still growing balloon. She rushes out of the water and grabs her arms, clings to her. Eddie's alive. She's alive. There's still time. 

"Mike, the fuck do we do now?" she calls. 

From somewhere on the other side of the cistern, she hears Mike yell, "Now? We believe in each other more than we've ever believed in anything before."

Fuck, Richie thinks. "Fuck!" she screams. 

"Do not fucking die on me," Eddie commands, eyes wide and wild and flitting desperately across Richie’s face. Richie grabs her face with both hands, mindful of the gauze covering a literal stab wound as an afterthought only, forces Eddie to look at her as she nods furiously. "I'm serious, don't. You can't fucking die on me now, motherfucker, don't-"

"I'm here," she mutters. "I'm here, Eds, I'm right here-"

_"Did it work, Mikey?"_

Richie squeezes her eyes shut briefly and shakes her head, as if willing away that motherfucking voice, but when she opens her eyes and looks to the middle of the cavern again it's too late. 

It's not It's true form, but it's fucking terrifying nonetheless. It's the fucking clown again, massive and towering and actually, mostly just the clown’s head, still growing limbs. "Fuck you!" she screams at It.

" _Did it work?_ " It repeats. It's grinning, laughing gleefully at them. " _Did you believe it would?_ "

"Don't listen," Mike shouts, cracked and desperate. "Don't give it what it wants!"

The clown keeps growing. Only this time, it's less clown- the head is there, eyes rolling back and forth lazily, pointed smile dripping with discolored spit, revealing hundreds of razor sharp teeth- but where the body should be, there's fucking spider legs again.

"Are you running out of material, dipshit?" Richie taunts. "Cause the whole spider thing is getting old." It recoils a bit at that, but one towering spider leg still slams into the water as It begins to crawl out of its hole. 

" _Twenty-seven years, I dreamt of you._ " 

Richie can see Bill somewhere to her left, and- still clinging to Eddie's arm for dear life, tugging her along- scrambles to reach him. She sees Ben and Beverly further away, desperately pulling Mike with them. Out of her peripheral, she sees It's mouth start to open wide.

"The Deadlights," Beverly shouts. "Don't look at them!" 

_"I craved you!"_

The Losers Club meets each other halfway, grabbing hold of one another as It approaches, pointedly not looking at its gaping mouth. Eddie presses close against Richie's side, like she's trying to be absorbed into her body, anything to escape. Richie feels about the same about the current circumstances. She manages to glance over at the rest of the group as they back away toward the entrance of the cistern. Richie believes Mike, she really does. She also believes that Mike couldn't have known this was a trap. 

It's definitely a trap.

" _Oh, I missed you!_ " Pennywise cries. " _I waited for this very moment._ "

"I'm so sorry, guys," Mike says.

"You couldn't have known," Bill tells him. 

Mike shakes his head. "I should've."

Pennywise grins.

_"It's time to float!"_

Another massive claw slams into the water in front of them, and Richie jumps back. It loosens her grip on Bill and her hand slips free, so when Eddie fucking books it out the way they came, Richie has no choice but to follow. 

"Go!" Mike yells. “We have to stick together-”

Richie turns to look at Mike as he speaks, but when she turns... the group is gone. "No," she whispers. "No, no, no- fuck, _no_!"

"Richie," Eddie calls. She turns back, immediately rushes over and grasps Eddie's face again, looks over her in desperation.

"You okay?" Richie asks uselessly.

"No," Eddie answers, winded. At least she's being honest. "C'mon, we gotta find the others."

They continue back down toward the cistern, but it no longer looks like the entrance to the cistern. It's just... more cave. Richie reaches for Eddie's hand, this time interlocking their fingers. She's not taking any chances. She can't do this alone. 

They walk like that for a couple yards, until Richie sees something familiar and freezes.

Three doors: _Not Scary At All, Scary, Very Scary._

“Not Scary At All was a no-go last time,” Richie thinks aloud.

“It’s probably reverse psychology, right?” Eddie reasons. “We have to pick Very Scary.”

“What? Fuck no, dude, that sounds awful.”

“I’m doing it,” Eddie replies, already walking forward and dragging Richie with her.

“I don’t consent to this!”

“Sucks for you,” Eddie says flatly, and opens the Very Scary door. 

Inside is a hang bar of hung clothes, jackets and shirts and dresses, with rows of shoes beneath it. A closet. Richie feels called out. 

She looks beside her at Eddie, who looks at the closet with furrowed brows for a moment, but suddenly the confusion melts and gives way to wide eyes with an unreadable emotion, and Eddie stumbles away. “What?” Richie asks.

And then she hears it. “ _Where’s my shoe?_ ”

Footsteps. Heavy breathing. Then out of the dark closet skips the hips and legs of someone wearing only one shoe. 

_Shit. Betty Ripsom._

Immediately Eddie slams the door shut. She looks like she’s just seen a ghost- which, technically, she has. 

“You alright?”

Eddie shakes her head. “Okay. Not Scary At All.”

They scramble over to the far left door and hover there for a moment. Richie opens the door this time, figuring Eddie deserves a break-

It’s a fucking Pomeranian. 

Richie sighs. She wants to feel relieved, but she’s seen and been through too much shit in this fucking sewer system to take anything at face value. Still, the Pomeranian wags its tail excitedly at them, and that’s… not terrible. 

“I’m not falling for this shit again,” Richie mutters.

Eddie shakes her head violently. “Richie, make it sit.”

Richie leans down a little, and squints at the dog. “I know your moves, you little bitch.” She pauses, glances at Eddie out of the corner of her eye, and whispers firmly. “Sit.”

Surprisingly, the Pomeranian sits. 

“Okay, that’s kind of cute.”

“Good boy,” Richie encourages.

“Who’s a good boy?”

The Pomeranian just pants at them. And then it grows, stretches out to fill the entire hall, and growls at them, snarling with razor sharp teeth. Richie slams the door shut, and they run.

“Okay, yeah, all bad.”

Eddie huffs and grabs Richie’s hand again. “Next time we’re just going with regular Scary.”

It takes Richie a minute to process that, and when she does, her eyes bug out at Eddie as she’s dragged down the length of the cave, back where they came- maybe. “ _Next time_?!”

Richie’s not positive how they end up back at the mouth of the cistern, but she’s long since quit trying to make sense of how time and space works in Derry. What greets them is the sight of Mike wrapped up in one of It’s fucking tentacles, which she doesn’t bother to question either. Instead she panics, then yells-

“Hey, asshole!”

It’s giant head swerves, flashing Richie a slimy, fucking demonic grin as it drops Mike into the water. Eddie stumbles backwards, letting go of Richie’s hand in the process. She glances back at Eddie worriedly- she knows she’s closing herself off again, receding back into herself in fear, she wants to reach out- but It is staring at her and fuck, she has to do something now, doesn’t she?

“You wanna play truth or dare?” Richie screams. “Here’s a truth- you’re a _sloppy bitch_!”

She vaguely hears Eddie whisper her name in horror behind her, but she’s too busy staring Pennywise down as it clambers through the water over her way. She sees Mike, sees Bill and Bev and Ben attending to him, watching her nervously, so she does what she does best. 

She keeps talking. 

“Yeah, that’s right, let’s dance!” she yells, throwing out her arms wide. It starts to open its mouth, which Richie distantly remembers isn’t a good thing at all. “Yippee kai-yay, motherfu-!”

Richie doesn’t get a chance to finish that beautiful thought, because she locks eyes with the Deadlights at the back of It’s throat, and she sees it. 

_She’s in the exact same spot when Eddie yells “beep beep, motherfucker!” Then she’s being physically knocked to the ground, snapping her out of her daze blinking and peering through the dark cave up at her best friend laying on top of her, crowding her space. “Richie! Yeah, there you are! Listen- I think I got it! I really think I killed it! I-”_

_Eddie doesn’t get a chance to finish that thought. Somewhere, Beverly screams. Richie blinks a few more times, searching Eddie’s face. Her mouth is gushing blood for some reason. Her gaze falls and- oh. Oh, that’s not good, is it?_

_One of It’s razor sharp claws ran straight through Eddie’s chest, leaving a gaping hole right in the middle of her torso. She falls forward._

_“Eddie? Eddie?!”_

_“Richie,” she whimpers. Richie shifts Eddie’s body around and holds her in her lap, hands flying up to run over Eddie’s face. The movement smears some of the blood dripping out of the corner of Eddie’s mouth and down her chin, and Richie chokes. “Richie-” She coughs, which turns into a desperate wheeze._

_“It’s okay, Eds, fuck-” Slowly, carefully, Richie helps Eddie stand. She immediately stumbles, and Richie ends up supporting her full weight as they rush to hide behind another tall, jagged rock, where she sits Eddie down and props her up against it. “It’s okay, shit, we just gotta apply pressure, right? Stop the bleeding? Eddie?”_

_Eddie’s crying. She’s fucking crying, oh god, Richie can’t do this. She blinks hard. She has to._

_“C’mon,” Richie mutters, “C’mon!” Ben appears behind Eddie and helps Richie support Eddie enough to hide in the catacombs, a small tunnel too narrow for It to follow them through. The others rush to Eddie’s aid, too, and suddenly the Losers are forced to rethink their plans._

_“I almost got it,” Eddie rasps. She makes eye contact with Mike as she speaks, wide eyed and worried but as fiery and stubborn as always. “I saw it, the leper. I almost choked it to death. I could feel it dying.”_

_“We have to make it small,” Mike whispers in an echo._

_Beverly points through the cistern, past where Pennywise is fighting the tiny rock passage to reach them. “If we go back out the way we came, it’s too narrow for It to follow us. We make it shrink, and we have a shot.”_

_“Come out and play, Losers!”_

_The Losers make a run for it- all but two. Richie can hear them as It cuts them off, as they’re forced to reformulate again, but she can’t fucking move._

_“Rich,” she gasps. “I have to tell you something.”_

_Richie’s hands cup Eddie’s face gently, keeping her head from lolling to the side again. “Yeah, Eds, anything.”_

_Eddie smiles. She’s still crying, but she smiles with blood stained teeth as she says, “I fucked your mom.”_

_Somewhere within the cistern Mike has told them they can make It small here, make it feel small, and now they’re shouting names at It. Apparently that’s something._

_“Imposter!”_

_“You’re a mimic! A mimic!”_

_“You’re a fucking bully!”_

_“You’re just a fucking clown!”_

_“A dumb fucking clown!” Richie screams, still refusing to leave Eddie’s side. She can’t do that. She can’t fucking move._

_“Go,” Eddie says._

_Richie shakes her head. “I’m not leaving you like this.”_

_“You have to, fucknuts. Go.”_

_Richie sucks in a painful breath, nodding violently, hands still holding Eddie’s face. “I’ll be right back,” she promises. Eddie rolls her eyes, and she runs._

_It’s a blur of primal fear and desperation, screaming names at a rapidly shrinking Pennywise until he’s just a little spider with an equally little head melting into the center of the cistern. They squeeze his beating heart until it bursts, shatters into a billion fragments and floats away. They defeat It._

_“Hey, Ed, we got Pennywise,” Richie calls as she runs back out to the perimeter of the cistern, where Eddie lays. She’s not moving. She says nothing. “Eddie?”_

_She hears Beverly say her name. Bill says something else she tunes out completely._

_“She’s alright. No, she’s just hurt. We got to get her out of here.” She slips one arm behind Eddie’s back to start lifting her up. Her head lolls lifelessly onto Richie’s shoulder. “She’s hurt.” She looks up at the group, locking eyes with anyone who will look at her directly. “Ben. No, she’s okay. We have to get her out of here, Bev.”_

_Beverly’s in tears, she realizes. “Richie?”_

_“What?”_

_She crouches next to her, starts rubbing her back, why is she doing that? And why is she crying now, too?_

_“I think she’s dead.” Richie starts shaking her head violently, her glasses nearly flying off with the force of it. The cistern is falling to pieces around them, the area where the fucking clown lived and breathe caving in from his absence. She clings to Eddie’s body, bloody and broken and lifeless and gone, she’s gone, she’s gone, she’s lost her twice, she lost the love of her entire goddamn life twice- “We have to go, come on.” Beverly grabs both of Richie’s arms and starts pulling, but Richie shoves her off. “Come on, Richie.”_

_Finally Bill grips Richie underneath her armpits and yanks her up until she’s standing, forcing her away. “We have to go,” he says close to her ear. She can barely hear him. She’s sobbing._

_“Beep beep, motherfucker!”_

Richie is physically knocked to the ground, snapping her out of her daze blinking and peering through the dark cave up at her best friend laying on top of her, crowding her space. “Richie! I think I got it!” 

She has seconds to comprehend what she just saw. 

Eddie looks thrilled with herself, _come on, Richie, we have to go_ , “I think I killed it,” _I think she’s dead_. 

It hits Richie at full force with a horror she’s never felt before.

“Move!” she screams. Eddie frowns, opening her mouth to retort, but Richie shoves her off and to the side before she gets the chance to speak, immediately starting to push her far away from that exact spot and scrambling after her.

It’s claw pierces the rocky ground where Eddie’s back should’ve been. 

They’re quiet for a minute. Richie, still fucking dazed from her nightmare-fuel Deadlights vision, continues to shove Eddie until she’s standing and they’re able to scramble and hide behind a jagged outcropping of rock.

Seconds ago she’d watched Eddie die here. 

“What the fuck?” Eddie deadpans. 

Richie falls to her knees.

Eddie follows immediately, grabbing her shoulders and forcing Richie to look at her. She thinks there’s tears in her eyes, maybe they’re already making their way down her face, but she’s positive she looks about as devastated and, frankly, traumatized as she feels. “Richie? Richie, it’s okay, I thought I got it, but we can still get it... Richie?” 

“I watched you die,” she mumbles. Her voice is watery and thick, so she definitely thinks she’s on the verge of crying. “Eddie, I saw-”

Recognition flashes in Eddie’s eyes instantly, and she pales. “You saved my life,” Eddie whispers.

“I saw it, I saw you… _you_ -”

“I’m here,” Eddie says firmly. She grabs Richie’s hand, fumbles for Richie’s middle and ring finger, and presses them against the soft skin right beneath her jaw. Eddie’s pulse is thundering. “You feel that? That means I’m alive. I’m here. I could’ve… I _could’ve_ died, but you-” she pokes Richie directly in the chest for emphasis- “saved me. I’m here, Richie, I promise. It was just a vision, it didn’t happen. That wasn’t real. _This_ -” she presses Richie’s fingers more firmly to her pulse- “is real.” 

Richie feels a sob bubbling up in her throat, but before it can escape, she hears Mike yelling.

“There’s more than one way to make someone small.”

Eddie grabs both of Richie’s arms and stands, pulling Richie with her. “You good?”

No. “Yeah.” 

“ _I am the eater of worlds!_ ” Pennywise taunts.

Richie and Eddie walk into the grey water hand in hand. Richie stares It down with a vengeance, an infuriated fire reborn fueling her steps forward, because fuck this asshole for thinking it could try and kill Eddie Fucking Kaspbrak in any version of reality and get away with it. 

“Not to us you’re not,” Mike says. “You’re just a clown.”

“You’re a weak old woman,” Beverly shouts.

It stumbles backwards again, falling onto its hind legs. The Losers have him right where they want him, cornering him in the dead center of the cistern as he shrinks away into nothing.

“ _Eater of worlds,_ ” It declares, but it lacks heat. It’s weak.

“A headless boy.”

“Imposter!”

“You’re a mimic! A mimic!”

“You’re a fucking bully!”

“You’re just a fucking clown!”

“A dumb fucking clown!” Richie screams.

What remains of Pennywise by the end of the torrent of taunting and screaming is nothing but a head and a tiny body, sinking and deflating into the rocks encircling the middle of the cistern. It’s still laughing at them, one last sick attempt to regain control. 

“You’re dying,” Eddie says. Richie stares at her. “You’re just a sick, twisted piece of shit who thinks it can get whatever it wants, but you’re really just dying. That’s all you’ve ever been. The only power you have is the power people give you when they’re scared of you, but now? We’re not fucking scared of you, and now you’re wasting away.” She swallows hard, and squeezes Richie’s hand. “Fucking dumbass clown.”

“A clown with a scared, beating heart,” Mike says, and plunges his hand into It’s tiny chest. Richie winces as he rips out It’s beating heart, watches it thump in his grip at a speed no human heart could survive at. It gives her a twisted sense of glee to watch this fucker die, finally. For real. 

Mike holds up the beating heart, and as he squeezes, holds it out between the Losers. They join hands in the middle, feel the steadily inclining pulse in their hands, and squeeze.

“ _Look at you,_ ” Pennywise whispers. Richie spares It one final glance as it says, “ _you’re all grown up._ ”

It’s heart shatters in their palms, and the fragments start to float away, up through the top of the cavern. Pennywise melts into the rocks like the Wicked Witch of the West, leaving the Losers alone in an empty cistern.

An empty cistern that starts to shake and crumble. 

“We have to go,” Richie says sharply, tugging Eddie along with her as she makes a break for the way they came in. “I saw, in the Deadlights, this place- it’s falling apart without It. We don’t have much time.”

Beverly nods and rushes alongside them, followed closely by the boys. It's a tight scramble back the way they came, what with the shaking cavern and hurdling debris every which way. Richie holds Eddie's hand tightly in her fist and does not fucking let go for a second, and thankfully, Eddie holds onto her just as hard. They only let go momentarily to clamber up ladders and hoist themselves up knotted rope, but their hands find each other as soon as their feet hit solid ground again. It grounds her as they sprint for their lives, narrowly escaping the dying well house that's haunted her nightmares since she was thirteen. Half the time, she hadn't even realized what it was. She couldn't have. 

Now it's as clear as the street outside where their bikes used to be parked, waiting for them, and as clear as her grown up friends panting raggedly, covered in mud and sewer water and sweat and tears outside 29 Neibolt Street as it plummets straight into the ground. 

"Think that'll make the news?" Richie asks. 

It's slow, and hesitant, but Bill actually laughs. Eddie looks pained, but she squeezes her hand, and she's smiling a little. The Losers Club laughs together at a stupid fucking joke Richie made as the anchor tethering them to Derry, Maine snaps and sinks into its grave. 

"This is disgusting," Eddie finally mumbles, shrugging off her maroon- now soaked and filthy, it looks blood red, and the comparison makes Richie flinch- jacket and tying it around her waist. Uncomfortable is an understatement. She looks horrified. "I need... seventeen showers."

"The townhouse is too far," Beverly says. Her eyes are alight with mischief. "I have an idea."

"I'm not going to like it, am I?"

Beverly laughs. "No, you're not." 

-

Old habits die hard. One particular habit being that the Losers are all cowards- all except for Beverly Marsh, who catapults herself into the quarry without so much as a second glance downward. Richie watches her soar with wonder, watches as one by one the rest of the group jumps in after her. Eddie groans in disgust, but follows suit. 

Other old habits, of course, include that the Losers are only cowards until provoked. Then they're fucking menaces.

Still, Eddie Kaspbrak is Eddie Kaspbrak. "This is so fucking gross," she starts to rant, swatting at Richie's head as she hoists Eddie onto her shoulders from where she's perched on an underwater rock. "Knock it off, dipshit! Do you know how many bacteria is in this shit? And how much literal shit is in this shit? We just fucked around in a sewer all night, there's so much rust and old fucking metal in those things- fuck, I bet there's like, old rusty nails and shit at the bottom of this thing, you know, from the warehouses? We could get fucking _tetanus_ if we aren't careful-"

Instead of letting her finish, Richie tips Eddie off of her shoulders into the water, laughing as she flails and comes back up for air to splash Richie and scream, shoving her under by the shoulders. It's stupid and playful and fun in a way they haven't been since they came back, or since they were thirteen. She can see the others floating around them, just watching them bicker again. It's the kind of familiar that Richie can get used to. 

"Hey, Eddie?" Ben says.

Eddie ducks underwater to smooth her hair over, then comes up for air, dragging her hands over her face to push off the water unsuccessfully. "Yeah?"

"Thanks." Eddie frowns, but Ben continues before she can interrupt, soft and smiling. "For always looking out for us."

Richie's throat is impossibly tight, so she grabs Eddie's hand underwater and squeezes it hard. Eddie looks torn between devastated and affectionate, and her expression settles somewhere in the middle. "You guys would be lost without me," she teases. "In the hospital all the goddamn time."

"Richie would’ve already died of lung cancer by now," Beverly snickers, but it's not mean. She almost looks jealous. 

Eddie blinks. "Don't you smoke, though?" she asks Richie.

Richie looks a little lost for a moment, but she shrugs like it's nothing. "I quit, like, a million years ago," she mumbles. Eddie starts grinning. "Like, I couldn't remember why, but I knew this weird, paranoid little kid would fucking kill me if I died from some kinda smoking-related disease, so..."

"That's so fucking _cute_ ," Eddie howls, and throws her arms around Richie's neck, which sends them both sinking down into the water as the Losers laugh. "You fucking _softie_ , who are you and what have you done with Richie Tozier?"

Richie snorts and ducks her head into Eddie's neck, hiding unnecessarily. "Me? Soft? Surely you can't be serious."

Eddie, with a completely straight face- save for the wobble at the corners of her lips where she's desperately fighting a smile- deadpans, "I am serious, and don't call me Shirley."

Richie cackles. "Oh my god, and you criticize _my_ humor? That was a kiddie joke, Eduardo, I'm shocked and offended-"

"Shut the fuck up, you _literally_ set me up for that one-"

"I would _never_ resort to such a cheap joke-"

"Your _whole fucking career_ is built on cheap jokes!"

Eventually Bill, failing to hide the fact he's laughing his ass off, mock attempts to break up their banter, which only spurs them on to dragging Bill into it, splashing him and tackling him in dunk-related fighting moves that are really poorly disguised hugs, until all of the Losers are play fighting like it's the summer before high school begins, and they've got nothing to lose. 

They've already won the thing that matters most.

-

The soaking wet walk down Center Street is less than ideal, but the sun dries their clothes out as they walk in the general direction of the townhouse. Bill stops in the street, and Richie nearly bumps into him, but she looks into the empty shop window and sees.

The Losers Club proper. 

If she squints, she can see what they all looked like as kids. Eddie, tiny but mighty, and always ready to kick her ass. Bill, the persistent, lanky motherfucker. Beverly, soft and defiant and lovely. Ben, with his heart permanently worn on his sleeve. Mike, quiet and sure, like the glue that held them together. 

And herself, weird and pale and tall. Not everything has changed. 

But there’s a gaping hole in their lucky seven, and looking in the window, she can feel it. There’s supposed to be a curly haired Jewish boy next to her, looking at her like she’s the dumbest person on earth and he’s perpetually questioning why he likes her so much. He’s not there, and she feels it like she’s bleeding out. 

“Guys,” Bill interrupts. He’s staring down at the palm of his hand. “Are your-”

Richie looks down at her right palm. There’s supposed to be an unexplainable deep scar there, the unreachable memory of a long forgotten pact, a blood oath that seven kids took before they really understood blood oaths, or really anything. There’s nothing but smooth skin and regular hand creases. 

That scar was one of the only things that tangibly proved that the shit they just went through isn’t made up, and it’s gone. 

“It’s really over, isn’t it?” Ben asks.

No one is up to answering that question, but a heavy look is shared between the six regardless. 

They continue their trek in mostly silence. Eddie falls in step alongside Richie, occasionally murmurs more incredibly helpful health stats about sewer water and manmade lakes, and Richie responds with snarky comments and elbow-nudges. The whole time Eddie looks like she can’t decide whether she’s pleased or annoyed, and Richie feels incredibly accomplished. They make it to the townhouse in one piece, all things considered, and start to separate and gather their things, clean up. 

It’s over. It’s done. 

Then Beverly screams, and everything is forgotten in the rush to her side. She’s sitting in the driver’s seat of her car with her mouth dropped open, fresh tears falling down her face. 

Ben immediately crouches next to her. “What, what is it?”

Beverly shakes her head. All she does is hold up her phone, showing a voicemail message from an unknown number, and hit ‘speaker.’

“ _Hey, Losers._ ”

It’s Stanley.

“ _I’ve only got yours and Mike’s numbers, so I guess I’ll just keep trying to call until you idiots pick up. I mean, I understand why you didn’t let my lovely wife finish-_ ” There’s a pause, and a unintelligible murmur, and Stanley laughs.

“ _If you would’ve let her finish, you’d know that I’m okay. I’m in the hospital._ ” Another pause, this time a bit longer. “ _There was an… attempt, but I was unsuccessful. Anyway, I guess you all made it to Derry, at least I hope you did. I’m sorry I couldn’t make it._ ” Silence. A deep, ragged breath. “ _I won’t be out for a little while, I don’t think, but… if you do need me to go, if you think there’s even time enough to wait… I’ll go._ ” There’s more murmuring no one can make out. To the side Stanley says, “ _I think we were meeting to tackle some unresolved group trauma from our childhoods._ ”

Richie can’t help it- she laughs. The rest of the group chuckles with her, Eddie throws an arm around Richie’s waist and hugs her close. She’s trying not to cry.

“ _And if you didn’t wait… well, if you’re listening to this… I’m proud of you guys. I don’t know what happened down there, but I’m fucking proud. You’re all so brave and incredible and I’m lucky to know you all._ ” More murmuring. “ _Okay, I have to go. Please call back. Either let me know if I need to haul ass to Maine for the first time in twenty years-_ ” murmuring- “ _twenty five, thank you, or if you want… I’m in Florida. Advent Health Orlando, for the foreseeable future._ ” He’s quiet for another second. “ _I’m sorry. I love you guys._ ” Click.

Richie bursts into tears. 

She can’t help it, she just immediately starts crying. One hand goes flying to cover her mouth, and her eyes squeeze shut against the torrent, but she’s already crying and there’s not much to be done about it. Eddie squeezes her waist once, and she’s crumpling to the pavement, onto her knees with her wet face in her hands.

The Losers don’t say anything as they follow her down and huddle around her protectively, a mess of dirty arms and legs and teary faces. Beverly slips out of her car and curls up right against Richie’s other side, rests her head on her bicep and clings to her arm tightly. Bill is right in front of her, arms around her neck, just letting her sob into his chest. Eddie’s still at her other side, pressed right up against her, worming her way under Richie’s arm. Mike and Ben hold the fort behind her. She feels Ben’s broad chest against her back, his head on the back of her shoulder, and Mike’s shaky breathing, too. And she just fucking cries. 

It’s the safest she’s felt since she set foot in Maine again, or maybe in her whole life.

Eventually her sobs shudder and die down, and she’s left breathing heavily into Bill’s shirt, shaking. It takes her a minute to find her voice.

“So, road trip?”

The Losers laugh around her, warm and comforting. Bill pulls back a bit to look at her. He’s smiling, tears in his eyes, too. “That’s the best idea you’ve ever had, Trashmouth.

Richie snickers, rubbing the heels of her hands beneath her eyes. “Yeah, I have those sometimes.”

“Road trip?” Bill echoes to the group.

Richie looks around at her best friends as they nod. Her eyes meet Eddie’s and stay there. She still looks pale and scared, is still leaning on Richie heavily for support, but there’s light in her eyes again. A spark, which is not nothing.

“Yeah,” Eddie says.

-

The first thing they do is return to the townhouses and clean up- really clean up. 

Eddie’s bathroom is… well, it’s still bloodstained, so Richie offers up hers. She lets Eddie take a shower first, throws the very few things she actually took out of her bag since arriving back into it and grabs some clean, not sewer water-soaked or bloody clothes to put on. Eddie comes out in a dusty yellow polo with a heathered grey jacket and jeans, dark hair soaking wet and dripping around her. She kind of looks like a wet dog. Richie grins with the utmost fondness.

“Cute, cute, cute,” she mutters as she walks by, attempting to reach over and ruffle Eddie’s hair.

“Do _not_!” Eddie screeches, ducking away from her instantly, fully ignoring Richie’s full body laugh as she runs into the bathroom and shuts the door. “You fucking asshole, I just showered, at least get the fucking mud and piss off of you first before you start physically assaulting me!”

“Love you too, Eds!” she sings, and starts up the shower again.

It takes a while for the Losers to feel comfortable enough to leave each other- if only for a grand sum of thirty minutes. The unspoken questions are loud in the parking lot where they regroup before splitting up again, and they echo in Richie's mind, so she, of course, speaks them.

"You think we'll forget again?" she asks. It comes out smaller than she intended. 

Mike shakes his head. "I think that was just part of It's power over Derry. Now that It's gone..." He shrugs. "There's nothing to make you forget."

"Well, I hope you're right," Ben says. Richie blinks, and he and Beverly are holding hands. How'd she miss that? Beverly catches her gaze and rolls her eyes. Richie pokes out her tongue. 

"He was right before," Bill says as they make their way to their separate cars. Mike pauses mid-step. 

"Not always."

Richie turns to look at him. The others continue walking for another moment, but once they notice, they freeze. "You were half right," she tells him. "You knew we had to do it together or it wouldn't work." 

Mike's lips thin into a fine line, his eyes slanting in a look she's seen on Bill's face way too many fucking times- guilt. "I should've known how bad it would get," he whispers. "That it couldn't have been that easy. I should've known..."

"You _couldn't_ have," Richie echoes, and steps toward him, grabs both his shoulders. "Even if you didn't get the details right the first time, your plan did work. We believed we could, and we did, and now It's dead." She gestures vaguely at the whole group. "And we're all alive. Fuck, _Stanley_ is alive, dude." She swallows hard. "You're the bravest motherfucker I've ever met, Micycle, and I'm not gonna let you beat yourself up for making a really tough decision and calling us back here. You knew we might hate you for making us do it, and you did it anyway. That's brave. Braver than I could ever be."

Mike just shakes his head at her, but he's smiling a little. With a fond little laugh, Richie leans forward and wraps her arms tight around Mike, squeezing him a little. "I'm sorry."

"Shut up." She pauses, hugs him a little tighter. "Hey. I'm kinda glad I came."

When she draws back, Mike is smiling. "Me, too."

"You good?" Bill asks.

"Yeah."

The Losers Club parts ways and starts the drive out of Derry. Eddie's sleek black rental car leads the way, a relatively short and weirdly easy drive from the wooded nowhere of Derry to the real life city of Bangor that feels far too convenient after the shithole two days they just had. The plan is, vaguely, to take Ben's massive work van down to Florida so they can all drive together. No one’s keen on splitting up just yet- frankly, the drive to Bangor is pushing it. 

"The fuck do you even use this for?" Richie asks as the Losers pile in at the airport parking lot. "You could hide so many dead bodies in here."

"Beep beep, Richie," Beverly groans, but she's fighting a laugh. She glances back at Richie from her perch on the shotgun seat, next to Ben, who's offered to take the first shift. Richie has her feet propped up in Eddie's lap, who is currently valiantly trying to shove her off, but is- understandably- too tired to make a huge effort. From somewhere behind them, in the row of seats behind them, she hears Bill snort a laugh at them where he's sitting with Mike. 

"Anyone want coffee?" Ben asks. A handful of Losers chime in with their orders, and he starts driving. 

About five minutes, or maybe seconds, into the drive, Richie’s stomach audibly grumbles. “Maybe make that breakfast,” she requests.

“Sure.” Ben glances at the group via the rearview window. “McDonald’s breakfast is probably still open.”

Eddie makes a horrified face. “Dude, what the fuck? That shit is so bad for you. Fast food is disgusting, do you know how much fat, no, how much fucking _sodium_ is in-” The Losers meet Eddie’s disgusted stare with matching exhausted ones, and she quiets. “Fine,” she grumbles, pouting as she sinks back into her seat. “Get me an Egg McMuffin.” 

Richie giggles. When Eddie glares at her for it, she just gives her a thumbs up. 

She stayed mostly coherent through breakfast, managing to stuff a McGriddle and an entire large fry into her face and wash it down with a sugary frappe Eddie complained had, like, no coffee in it- to which Richie shrugged and said, "same difference." She's pretty sure that sent Eddie spiraling, but the last thing she remembers is curling up against the door using her jacket as a pillow, still watching Eddie through half lidded eyes. The next time Richie stirs, it's brighter outside, but the van is quiet. She doesn't move much, just shifts around with eyes still glued shut, and vaguely registers the softer fabric against her cheek, the absence of her glasses frames digging into her face while she sleeps uncomfortably. 

"It's such bullshit, but I still feel guilty," she can hear Eddie murmuring. "Like, logically I know it's not my fault. I know that's not really how health works. Like, sure, stress can really fucking hurt your body, but..." She sighs. "Fuck, it's so dumb."

"It's not dumb," Beverly says gently. "She was your mom."

And, _oh_ , Richie gets it now.

"Do you remember your mom at all?"

There's a pause. "Not much," Beverly replies, almost curiously, like she hadn't thought about it before. "She was a redhead, I remember that." Beverly's voice takes on a far away quality Richie hasn't heard before. "She liked The Beatles, and movies. I think she was a photographer before she met my dad."

"Before?"

"I don't know if you remember, but my dad was a fucking cunt."

Eddie barks a laugh, immediately cutting it off and muffling the sound. "Shit. Yeah, you're right." 

It's silent for another long moment before she hears Beverly ask, “Do you remember your dad?”

Richie's heart cracks a little at that. She can clearly remember Eddie, tiny Eddie in, like, the second grade, crying after school and running to the bikes before anyone could catch her. Eddie throwing away the father's day letter she had to write in class. Eddie missing a whole week of school for the funeral. 

Eddie, years later, looking at Richie's first cigarette like it’s a punch in the face.

"He was a smoker," is what Eddie says, voice faint. "It wasn't his even lungs, it was, like... I think it was some shit with his liver? Some kind of cirrhosis that became liver cancer. But it scared my mom so fucking bad. She was convinced it was the smoking, and like, statistically she probably wasn’t wrong. I don't remember what it was. But then I got sick once, and my mom fucking… _lost_ it. It was never the same. She was kind of ridiculously overprotective before, but after my dad died... she was full on paranoid about everything. Anything could kill me, and she would have lost her husband _and_ her only kid." Eddie takes a shuddering breath. "And I know that's not my fault, and I never owed her shit, and everything she did to me was fucked up as all hell, but I..."

"It makes sense with the context," Beverly finishes kindly. "Not an excuse. Just explains it."

"Yeah. Something like that."

Suddenly, Richie is being kicked in the shins. She grunts a little and hides her face further in what she's cleverly deduced is Eddie's hoodie. "I know you're awake, dipshit."

"Mmm? Who, me?"

"You're so bad at faking sleep," Eddie snorts. 

Richie blinks her eyes open. Everything is... predictably blurry. Eddie hands her her glasses, and her vision clears. 

Fuck. Eddie looks so small, and teary, and if Richie's heart was breaking before, it's finally snapped in half. Eddie seems to realize that, because she ducks her head and leans back in her seat, pointedly staring out the window and down at the road as they drive. Beverly is up front now doing the aforementioned driving, and gives Richie a tiny smile through the rearview window. 

"How you holding up, Trashmouth?"

Richie stretches her arms forward, and rolls her neck a few times. "Alright," she answers honestly. "How long was I out?"

"You slept through lunch," Beverly laughs. "S'okay, so did Bill and Mike. We're almost out of New Jersey."

"Three miles," Eddie supplies, holding up her phone. "Wanna join our sad conversation about dead parents?"

Richie snorts, shakes her head a little, but says, "Yeah, sure." At that, Bev's smile fades. "My mom died, like, the year after I moved out of Derry," she explains.

"Shit, Richie," she whispers. "I didn't know."

Richie shrugs, looking down at her lap and fiddling with what is now clearly Eddie's hoodie. "Eh, it's fine. It's been a while, you know?"

"Still. Your mom was kinda cool."

"I've been hearing that a lot lately," Richie laughs, soft and weak. She glances at Eddie, who looks strangely guilty, and immediately adds, "It's fine, really. She liked you guys."

Eddie's brows furrow, an unspoken ' _but_?' on her face.

"We just..." Richie sighs, and goes back to staring down at Eddie's hoodie. "We didn't end things on good terms. Like, speaking terms?" She freezes a little, clenching the hoodie in her fists. "She and my dad had just found out I liked girls, and she was..."

"Oh." Richie doesn't look, doesn't particularly want to see Beverly's expression.

"The first fucking thing they said to me was, 'not in my house,' and it was like, okay? I'm going to college, that's fine, fuck you. And I moved out. And then she..." Richie swallows hard. "She got in wreck with a drunk driver and it just... destroyed both cars. Nobody made it out alive."

"Richie," she hears Eddie murmur. Fuck, she didn't want their pity. This was a mistake. 

"It's fine-"

Before she can shut it down, Eddie has- against all laws of logic and reason and everything a professional risk analyst should be known to do- unbuckled her seat belt just to move into the middle seat, fasten the seat belt there- okay, that's more like it- and wrap Richie up in her arms. 

Richie melts.

"It's not fine," she grumbles. Then, a pause. "I'm sorry," she adds, a little softer. 

"S'fine," Richie mumbles uselessly. "It was a while ago, so... I've had time to be sad about it. I'm not that sad anymore."

"Is that code for, I repressed the memory and everything I felt about it like I do with everything else that’s ever happened to me?"

 _Ouch_. "Call me out, Edward."

"That's... not even my name."

"She's got a point," Beverly cuts in. "You know you can talk to us about this stuff, right? You don't have to bottle it up like that."

Richie laughs, hollow and short. "Fuck, where were you guys in the nineties when I needed, like, a grief counselor or some shit?" She briefly glances up at Eddie, who looks devastated. Richie wonders why. 

"We're here now," Beverly answers. "I always thought I'd make a pretty good therapist."

"The best," Richie giggles. Eddie squeezes her tightly one last time before letting her go, and she misses the warmth immediately. So she curls back up against Eddie's hoodie and attempts to drift back off. 

She tries not to dream about homophobic slurs and crime scenes.

-

Richie takes over driving about halfway through Virginia, after a collective total of five hours of sleep in the back of a moving van, which isn't the worst place she's slept, but also isn't the best. Her entire back is sore, her neck is stiff, and it's forty five minutes to the next rest stop. But she remembers that Stanley Uris is in a hospital room in Orlando, waiting to hear from the Losers, and she drinks what's left of Eddie's coffee- she ordered a real one back in Jersey, and since she's fully signed off on driving this time around, hands it over to Richie, who desperately needs it- and wakes the fuck up.

Mike drives from Charleston to Jacksonville, finally handing off the keys to Bill, who makes it to a parking garage across the street from Advent Health Orlando, a hospital complex big enough to maybe house the entire population of Maine, or at least three Derry's. They practically run inside, like idiots. Patty Uris had told Mike that the ER was open 24 hours. Richie isn’t sure that means visitors, too, but she isn’t about to ask questions. 

Stanley Uris is waiting for them.

"Hi, we're here to s... see Stanley Uris?" Bill greets a nurse at the front desk. 

The nurse looks between the group curiously. Not quite suspicious, which Richie appreciates. "I'm sorry, but he's only seeing family at this time-"

"They're family," an unfamiliar voice says, coming from somewhere down the hall. Richie's eyes snap over to locate the source, and land on a woman who looks somewhere around their age. She's pretty, soft eyes wrinkled at the edges and dark with exhaustion, currently wringing her hands as she takes in the group. Patty, she thinks.

The nurse gives them another once over. "Alright," she says finally. "It's three in the room at a time for now." The nurse looks to Patty with a kind smile. "Is he awake?"

"Just woke up," Patty says. Her eyes are still trained on the Losers, which Richie thinks is pretty fair. 

Beverly is the first to step forward and offer a hand. "Beverly Marsh," she greets. "I'm sorry I... uh, hung up on you earlier."

"It's alright," Patty assures her, sounding small. She shakes Beverly’s hand for just a moment before pulling her in for a short, gentle hug. “Do you really call yourselves losers, or was that just Stan being… Stan?”

Richie can’t help but snort lamely, gaze flickering between her shoes and Patty’s face. “Nah, that’s us,” she answers. “A bunch of losers.”

Patty’s smile warms. There’s still an edge to it, like she isn’t quite sure what to make of the six of them, and Richie really can’t blame her at all. "Here, he's right this way."

Patty Uris leads the way down several long halls, where the walk-in exam rooms connects to the inpatient area, until the group reaches room 906. Patty stops walking, just watches the door for a moment, then turns back to the Losers looking a little lost. 

“So, three at a time?” Bill finally says, looking to Patty. “Two of us can g… go in with you, we can take turns.”

Patty kind of looks like she’s about to cry, but she’s smiling through it- genuinely, Richie thinks. It doesn’t look forced. Richie is very familiar with forced. “It’s okay,” she says slowly. “I know you’re anxious to see him.”

“You trust us?” Ben asks, an edge of sympathy beneath the genuine admiration in his voice. Richie agrees.

At that, Patty shrugs. “I trust my husband.”

“Good call,” Richie says. All eyes fall on her. “I mean, like, he’s always had annoyingly good judgement. I’d trust him, too.

The Losers don’t laugh until Patty does first, and then Richie revels in the levity, finally. As the group starts delegating who goes first, Patty steps aside, and turns to Richie. “Richie, right?”

Richie snorts. “Yeah. He told you about me?”

“He told me you were funny.”

Richie’s jaw drops. She must look as floored as she feels, because Patty laughs again. “He thinks I’m funny?” she repeats dumbly. A bright grin spreads wide across her face, crinkling at her eyes- _Stanley thinks she’s funny._ “Oh my god, I’m gonna hold that shit over his head for _forever_.”

Patty shakes her head. “He also told me never to tell you that.”

Immediately Richie makes a zipper motion over her lips. “Secret’s safe with me.”

“It has to be you three first, right?” Beverly says, gesturing at Bill. “You and Richie and Eddie.”

“Bev-”

“She’s right,” Mike cuts in, and Richie knows it’s settled. “The original Losers, yeah?”

“This isn’t a seniority thing,” Bill insists. “He’s ou… _our_ friend.” 

“Go,” Bev says, lightly pushing him toward the door. 

Richie spares one last glance around them all- Patty, who’s already taking a seat in an armchair across from the door, Ben and Beverly hanging back behind Mike, who’s smiling at them. 

“Don’t keep him waiting,” Mike says.

If she doesn’t do it now, Richie knows she’ll talk herself out of it, so she marches forward with Bill and Eddie in her wake, and walks right into Stanley Uris’ hospital room.

She’s not exactly sure what she expected to see, but Richie is in no way prepared for this.

In a lot of ways, Stanley looks the same. His eyes are dark and calculating as they look over the three of them. His lips are thinned into a tight, permanently serious line, like he’s still judging them with the utmost fondness- he often was, to be fair. His hair’s darker now, and shorter, still curly but styled neatly- god, even in the _fucking emergency room_ he looks impossibly put together. The only thing out of place is the five o’clock shadow, and even then, it looks purposeful. Stanley Uris went from an awkwardly too grown up kid to a reasonably grown up adult, and it stings more than Richie thinks it probably should. 

The other thing out of place, of course, besides the hospital gown and the steady beep of a machine Richie doesn’t even begin to know what it is, are the bandages running up both of Stanley’s arms. She winces. 

“Hey,” Stanley says. His voice is deeper- fucking _duh_ \- but still smooth and near irritatingly sure. It makes Richie shudder and swallow the pain and the grief still bubbling fresh in her gut down forcibly. 

“Hey,” Bill squeaks. Eddie nods a little. 

Richie wants to say something, anything, but it feels like she’s shrinking into herself, like her mind has fully evaporated from her body and is floating through the sky, never to be found again. Stanley’s looking at her, and it’s hard not to cry about that. 

“Do I have to guess what happened back there?” Stan asks finally, half teasing, but there’s an edge of seriousness.

Bill coughs and shakes his head. “It’s done,” he says slowly. “It… It’s dead. For good.”

“So fucking gross,” Eddie mumbles. Stan cocks his head to the side. “Those fucking sewers, dude. I didn’t miss ‘em.”

Stan pales as he nods. “Yeah. I remember.”

Richie watches him for a moment, still desperately taking it all in. It feels like if she looks away for a split second he’ll disappear, or she’ll wake up back in Derry, or some other godawful bullshit. “Neibolt’s gone,” she croaks. Stan stares at her. “The house, it fucking caved in on itself. It’s gone. Everything.” She holds up her hand where a scar should be, but isn’t. “The oath shit? S’gone, too.”

Stan sinks back into the pillows and sighs. “Fuck,” he mutters. He looks between them carefully again, like he’s considering, mulling- dwelling. “I’m so sorry-”

“No,” Bill cuts him off. “I know, but… just don’t, okay?” Stan winces visibly, and Bill softens. “We’re just fucking glad y… you’re alive, man.”

Richie nods furiously in agreement. Stan manages a tiny smile.

“You missed the Losers catch up,” Eddie says, pulling up a folding chair from a corner of the room and dragging it over to sit next to Stan. Her eyes are glued to him. “So what’s grown up Stanley been up to?”

Stan laughs- it’s a real laugh, richer than Richie remembers, but it’s still very much Stan’s laugh, and she has to frantically blink away the emotion the sound sets off. “I became an accountant,” he says, quickly adding- “no comments from the peanut gallery-” with a firm, heatless look Richie’s direction. She lifts both hands in mock surrender, and he continues with a grin. “I met Patty in grad school. We got married, and I got a job in Orlando… and the rest is history.”

“The abridged life and times of Stanley Uris,” Richie announces dramatically. “Fascinating.”

Stan raises a visibly judgmental eyebrow at her. “Better than your comedy special.”

Richie can’t help her massive grin. “Aw, you watched my _special_!”

“It sucked so bad.”

She shrugs. “I don’t write my jokes, I’m not offended.”

Stan rolls his eyes. 

“So what, you’ve just been working?” Bill asks, smiling fondly at his dumb, bickering friends. “Don’t tell me you still don’t know how to t… take a vacation.”

Stan’s warm look turns wistful at that. “We were planning a trip to Barcelona,” he says quietly. Then he lifts both arms briefly. “But… you know. Things came up.”

It’s dead silent for a long, terrible moment, save for the steady thrum of the air conditioner and the faint beep of hospital machinery, before Stan continues. “It took the one thing from me that I swore I’d never let anything take.” He looks between the three of them and adds solemnly, “You guys.”

Immediately Bill is kneeling beside the bed, his hand flying to clutch Stan's shoulder. "We're here now," he says firmly. "And that's not n... nothing."

"Yeah, dude, if you think I'm letting you out of my sight anytime soon you've got another thing coming," Richie assures him. 

Eddie smiles, tiny and sad. "You actually made Richie cry," she says softly. "Like, twice. I think that's a world record."

The faint traces of relief in Stanley's eyes melt away into this wounded, guilty look Richie is starting to think all of the Losers somehow genetically share. "Richie..."

"Shut up," she mutters, walking past Bill to lean on the wall next to Stan's bed. "Of course I did." She swallows, thick and painful, and blinks hard. Her hands are clenched tightly into fists in her jacket pockets, holding onto the last of her composure by a thread. "Fuck you, of course I did."

Bill gives her a cautious glance. Her whole chest feels heavy and too tight, like she's about to implode in on herself, the too-much of the past two days- _two fucking days_!- now finally sinking in and weighing her to the floor. 

"I'm sorry," Stan whispers. 

Richie sinks to the floor beside Stan's bed, grasping at the sheets in her fists, her eyes clouding over until they burn and drip. She quickly scrubs the heel of one hand behind her glasses before she can publicly cry about Stanley Uris, who is very much alive, a third time. 

"It’s okay," she says decisively despite the ghost of a grieved stab to her chest that still radiates painfully, sharp and new. "What matters is that you're here. We're all here, together." Stan looks at her, prying like he does. He’s always intuitively known she's absolutely full of shit, but he doesn’t tend to push it, and she’s never been more grateful. "I'm fucking serious, dude. There's no more murder clown around to make you forget me again, I'm gonna annoy you _so_ much."

"I'm counting on that," Stan mumbles, voice laced with faux dread. 

For the first time since arriving at Advent Health Orlando, Richie laughs. 

-

Richie doesn't remember falling asleep at the hospital, but by the time she wakes up it's past midnight and the Losers have booked two hotel rooms down the street for the weekend. It's Eddie who shakes her awake, gently, with hands on her face that make Richie's insides warm and flip around despondently. 

"Get up, nerd, we're crashing," is all she says. 

Richie sits up and rubs her eyes. Eddie hands her her glasses, which she puts on and blinks furiously. "What?"

Eddie rolls her eyes. "We got hotel rooms, and it's like, super fucking late. You coming?"

Richie looks around the hall, over at Bill and Beverly talking to Patty, offering hugs and warm smiles, exchanging pleasantries. Mike and Ben walk out of Stan's hospital room looking tired and a little heartbroken, understandably, but she soaks in their hopeful smiles when they rejoin the group. Her eyes linger on Patty, who looks exhausted. 

"Later," she mumbles. "I... I need a minute."

Eddie frowns and cocks her head to the side, which is just... unfairly adorable, fuck her. She follows Richie's gaze to Patty, though, and her frown softens. "Alright," she says. She leans down and gives Richie's shoulder a squeeze. "Don't be too long."

"Wouldn't dream of it." She blows Eddie a kiss as she walks away. Eddie flips her off with a laugh.

The Losers file out, leaving Richie sitting cross legged in an uncomfortable hospital chair across from Patty Uris, who's eyeing her curiously- not suspiciously, just curious. Understandable.

"Do you mind if I stick around a little?" Richie asks, genuine. "Cause I can go, I'm sorry, I don't wanna, like... overstay my welcome, I just..."

Patty smiles. "You're fine." She looks so fucking tired, and there's a thick layer of an unreadable emotion under her lighthearted expression, and it breaks Richie's heart. So she starts talking.

"Stan and I were best friends when we were really little," Richie says. She has no idea how much Stan has told her since he remembered, but Patty sits up visibly straighter and watches her ramble intently. "Like, really little. I think I met him in the first grade? Like, I think I told a bad 'your mom' joke and he just gave me the most judgmental look I've ever seen a literal _child_ give anyone and told me I was an idiot, and it was, like, friendship created. Life bond solidified." She pauses, frowns, and looks down into her lap. "We were so tiny."

"Not to be... rude, but he's never mentioned you," Patty says softly. "Any of you. Not before this week."

Richie nods at her lap. "Yeah, we all... you know, we grew apart when we got older. As kids are wont to do." She laughs, but it's empty. It's not her place to tell Patty anything of the Murder Clown Incident, if he even plans to attempt to breach that wild ass subject, so she dances around the details. "We made this... this fucking blood oath when we were, like, thirteen. That we'd all come back to Derry when we were older. A Losers Club Reunion or some shit." That makes her smile a little. "But Derry..." She glances up at Patty, who's still watching her in rapt fascination. "Derry sucks shit, to put it lightly."

Her little smile turns remorseful. "I haven't heard many good things about it," she agrees. 

"Did he ever tell you anything about it?"

Patty shakes her head. "Only vague things, like... his parents, or just... this vague awfulness he felt about it."

"Yeah," Richie sighs. "We... I mean, we call ourselves the Losers Club unironically." That makes Patty laugh. "We all got bullied pretty fucking bad as kids, so... that does track."

At that, Patty frowns. "He never told me about that." 

"We all repressed a lot of shit that went down in Derry," Richie says vaguely, hurriedly pulling the brakes on a conversation that super wasn't hers to have. "It's a really fucking backwards town. I didn't want to go back at all." She laughs. "Man, I fucking threw up when Mike called me and asked me to come back. Like, instantly."

Patty frowns sympathetically. "Why'd you go back, then?"

Richie glances over at Stanley's closed door, at the floor, closes her eyes, and remembers. 

_"You're not my friends! You made me come to Neibolt, you're not my friends!"_

"Cause they're my friends," Richie says quietly. "And they needed me."

When she looks up again, Patty's still got that sympathetic look on her face, one that's warm and kind and makes Richie feel small. She looks back at the ground, rubs at her eyes a little and says, "You can tell me to fuck off if you want, but you look really fucking tired." Patty laughs. "And I know I'm a stranger to you, so I totally get it if you don't feel comfortable, but if you wanna get some sleep I'd be more than willing to stay with Stan for a little longer..."

Richie glances up a little nervously, but Patty doesn't look pissed. "That's really sweet of you," she says. There's a tiny smirk on her face. "You're not trying to steal my husband away, are you?" she teases. Richie laughs, full on belly laughs. Patty giggles at her own joke. God, they're all such fucking messes.

"I'd never," she says honestly. 

"I know," Patty says. That smirk is still there, and _jesus_ , she sees why she gets on with Stan so well. They both see directly through her bullshit, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. "If you really wouldn't mind, I haven't actually slept in a bed since Sunday."

"I wouldn't offer if I did," Richie assures her. 

Patty gives a slow smile, hesitantly trusting. Richie tries to imagine herself in that position, letting a stranger spend the night with one of the Losers instead of her, and shudders. Braver than the fucking marines. 

But then Patty pauses, looking conflicted. "He's been having nightmares," she says, voice hushed. Richie's tentatively calm expression melts. "So if he wakes up-"

"You sure you want me to stay with him?" Richie asks. 

Patty pauses, lips pursing as she thinks. She locks eyes with Richie very seriously, and Richie doesn't look away, can't. "He's told me a lot about all of you since he… since he was admitted," she says slowly. "Everything he remembers. And I know you care for him, you've proven that much."

"I promise I'm not going to try and steal your husband," she attempts. Patty's lips quirk into a fleeting smile at that.

"I don't know you," she admits. "But he knows you, and he trusts you." 

Richie nods, her throat suddenly tight, vocal cords constricted. She can only nod. 

Patty gives her a short side-hug, a run down of the nurses' general rounds, directions to the bathroom and the cafeteria, and leaves Richie in the hall with a genuine, "It's really nice to meet you, all things considered." She'll take it. 

As soon as Patty leaves, she quickly yanks out her phone to text Eddie.

_To: Eddie Spaghetti_

_taking over Staniel Duty at the hospital so patty can actually sleep_

_From: Eddie Spaghetti_

_Okay. Tentative breakfast plans with the group at iHop. Not my choice. We'll save you a seat?_

_To: Eddie Spaghetti_

_and some pancakes pls_

_From: Eddie Spaghetti_

_order your own goddamn pancakes, you mooch._

Richie barks a laugh, immediately clapping her mouth over her hand to muffle the sound. Somewhere down the hall she sees a janitor coming to mop the area, and without thinking she stands and scurries into Stan’s room to get out of the way.

Stan is asleep, has been for most of the night, she's been told. Among many things that haven't changed, Stanley Uris still goes to bed at roughly 8 PM every night and wakes up at a reasonable hour- 6 AM on weekdays, but on weekends, he sleeps in all the way to 7, the mad lad. 

“Hey,” Stan murmurs.

Richie jumps, not so slyly covering it up by shoving her hands in her jacket pockets and looking sheepish. “Shit, sorry, did I wake you?”

“No,” Stan assures her. “I don’t really sleep that great in here.”

“That’s fair.” Richie pulls up a chair and sits next to the bed, slouching a bit to get comfortable.

“Where’s…?” 

“She went to go sleep,” Richie tells him. “I told her I’d take over Stanathan Duty.”

Stan smiles a little. “That’s sweet.”

“I’m very sweet,” Richie mumbles. 

“No comment.” 

“Shut up,” she laughs, but it falls a little short of humorous. “I missed you.”

“You too.” A pause. Stan looks her over, almost considering. “None of you actually told me what happened, you know.”

Richie blinks. “Uh…”

“I get that it, I mean…” Stan looks at her dead in the eye and shrugs. “It was bad, right?”

Richie starts to laugh nervously, hand flying to rub the back of her neck. “Yeah, no, it was fucking terrible. It was not fun at all, for anyone involved- very, very bad. Yes, you guessed correct. Zero out of ten, would not recommend.”

Stan’s still looking at her very seriously. Richie sighs, then starts nodding.

“Well.” She clears her throat dramatically and shifts in her seat. “Shall I start from the beginning, my good man?”

“If you’re going to do the British voice, I take it back,” Stan groans, head flopping back onto his pillow. “I don’t want to know.”

“C’mon, you love the British voice!”

“No, I don’t,” Stan says very matter of factly. “None of us ever have.”

“I am unappreciated in my time.”

Stan fights it, visibly, but he laughs. “Shut up. You said you all played catch up, right?” Richie rolls her eyes, but she nods. “Play catch up again.”

“Alright,” Richie caves, holding her hands up for a moment in defeat. “Where do we start? Well… it all began on a fateful Tuesday evening-”

"God damn it. It had to be you, huh?”

“You asked! You did ask!”

“I have many regrets.” He’s still smiling. “Go on.”

“Okay.” Richie takes a deep breath, thinking hard. “Uh, remember the Jade of the Orient? That’s where we met for dinner. And, uh… we all talked for a little, and at that point, I think we were all just remembering things still? I don’t know about you, but until Mike called, I… like, I literally forgot Derry existed?”

“Yeah,” Stan mumbles, nodding along. “Yeah, no. Me too.”

“So we were all still remembering everything- except Mike, you know, he never left. We did a around of _Where Are They Now: Losers Edition_ , that was fun… uh… oh! You’re gonna love this, I came out to the Losers by accident.”

Stan blinks a few times, eyes going wide. “You did what?”

“I came out, you know, of the closet? I’m bi-”

“No, I knew that,” Stan interrupts, shaking his head. “How do you come out by _accident_?”

“This is me we’re talking about.”

“Okay… fair.”

Richie laughs. “Anyway! Dinner, uh… Mike reminded us about It, and told us It was back, we hadn’t killed it, and we had to kill it, and I said… _no_.” Stan barks a laugh. “I said, uh, let me think about that! No! Actually, I don’t think I will. I don’t owe this town jack shit. I’m gonna leave… goodbye.” Richie pauses for effect, then mumbles. “Clearly that didn’t happen, but it’s the thought that counts.”

“I don’t blame you.”

Richie pauses and thinks, jaw clenching nervously. “Then Beverly called, and we had our little… collective breakdown. Our panic, one might say.”

“You cried, apparently.”

Richie immediately starts shaking her head, staring at her lap where she’s fidgeting with her jacket sleeves, which are suddenly the most interesting thing in the room. “We’re not gonna talk about that. I’m gonna gloss over that and skip to… the next morning. We went to the clubhouse! You know, the one that Ben built? Oh my god, we found your fucking _shower caps_ , it was wild.” Stan rolls his eyes. “I still don’t appreciate your shower caps, Stanley, I’m sorry.”

“The others appreciated my shower caps.”

“Wimps.” Before Stan can retort, she continues. “Anyway, there was some ritual Mike wanted to try to kill It with, like… we had to find, it was _so_ weird, we had to find little physical representations of like, our childhood traumas? And fucking burn them?” 

Again, Stan’s eyes go wide, but his expression remains carefully blank. 

“It was insane, Richie stresses. “So I told Mike- _hey, this is insane_! But Bill said something about… everything about It is stupid and ridiculous and nobody would believe any of it, you know? So of course the solution to the problem is stupid. I guess. It didn’t work, but it was a good try, you know? Besides, what did work was even stupider.”

“What was it?”

Richie pauses to makes a face. “I think we shit talked It to death.”

“... I’m sorry, what?”

“Yeah.”

“What does that even _mean_?”

“Okay, so the original backup plan was- if we went back out the way we came, It would have to shrink to fit back out through the, like. Sewer hole. Right?” Richie tries, gesturing wildly as if that’ll help explain. “Make it small so we can kill it easy. But then, you know, all hell broke loose, so plan C was to make it feel small? So we literally just… shouted insults at it for like, five minutes, like… we really just… belittled It to death?”

Stan just stares at her, jaw dropped wide open.

“Okay, actually, we belittled it until it was tiny enough for us to have a chance to kill it,” Richie amends in a ramble. “Dude, it was so badass, Mike ripped It’s heart out and we all just fucking crushed it, and then it just like, broke into a billion pieces and floated away. Kind of like its head did that summer?” She pauses. “But then, like, the sewers started to cave in and we had to run out really fast, and then as soon as we got out of the house it just fucking caved in on itself. Like, it disappeared, man. 29 Neibolt Street doesn’t exist anymore.”

“... What?”

“I know.”

“What the _fuck_?!"

“I don’t know!” Richie laughs. “God, it was so weird. Everything about the whole thing was weird and bad and I hated it. But it’s… it’s over.” She takes a deep breath, looks down into her lap. “And that’s the story of the Losers Club, and how they killed the demonic murder clown from outer space… thank you for coming to my TedTalk-”

“Okay, shut the fuck up.” Stan laughs a little, but he looks winded. “Holy shit.”

“Yeah. It was a weird two days. Day and a half? Two days… no, a day and a half.” Richie’s jaw drops. “Holy shit. That was literally not even two days.” 

Stan snorts. “How are you holding up?”

“Uh…” Richie shakes her head, deflecting with all her might. “You know? That’s a very good question, actually, so glad you asked…“ Stan’s looking at her expectantly. She’s not gonna get out of this one so easy. “I don’t know, man, I’m still processing. Ask me in, like, a year?”

“Alright. I will.”

“... Damn it- see, I know you will. Fuck.” Richie takes in his face, the concern- because of course the dude who’s literally in the hospital right now is worried about her- and sighs. “At this point, I’m just… the ritual felt too convenient, you know? It couldn’t have been that easy. But at this point… fucking everything to do with It feels too easy, you know? But everything’s gone. The house, our fucking… blood oath scars. It feels so final.”

“But it doesn’t feel over,” Stanley infers. She shrugs. “That would be where you’re supposed to start processing the brand new trauma you just went through.”

Richie laughs, short and empty. She stares down into her lap and fiddles with her shirt sleeves. “I swear to god, our lives are a horror movie, and it’s the shittiest fucking metaphor for childhood trauma I’ve ever seen.”

Stanley barks a laugh. “If our lives were a horror movie, it’d be a cult classic.”

“Sure.” Stanley nudges her in the ribs with his elbow. She smiles. 

Eventually Richie curls up in one of the hospital chairs, folding her jacket into a pillow and haphazardly settling in. Stan eyes her wonderingly. “We’re keeping in touch this time.” It’s not a question.

Richie nods through a yawn. “Told you, dude, I’m gonna annoy you so much.”

“Good.” She’s half asleep, but she registers the soft, “Love you, Richie,” and kind of wishes she could mumble it back, but she’s out like a light. 

It’s the soundest she’s slept all week. 

-

Patty joins them for breakfast in the morning, and greets a very sleepy Richie with grateful, at least slightly rested eyes. Richie takes a seat across from Eddie, who’s flipping through her menu with a grimace. “They have, like, two options here that won’t kill you before you’re fifty.”

Richie holds back the dark, self deprecating joke before it can bubble to the surface. “A pancake won’t kill you.”

“But it’s not good for you. Eating unhealthy foods as frequently as the fast food industry pushes it- and god, America’s the worst for this- but the amount of carbohydrates and sugars, especially sugars-”

“Eds,” Bill interrupts from the other side of the table. He and Mike have been here for a while, and he’s mid bacon-bite when he looks at her and says, “please save it for when I’m not eating.”

Richie can’t help but snort laugh, which earns her a glare from Eddie. 

When Beverly and Ben arrive they aren’t holding hands, but Richie sees it regardless. Beverly isn’t shy, at least she wasn’t as a kid. She told you straight up if she thought you- meaning Richie- were being a dumbass, she didn’t take bullying sitting down and that definitely made it worse for her in the end, she even hit her own father over the head with a vase once. Beverly Marsh has always been violently herself. To see her with pink cheeks and doe eyes over Ben- which is so fucking fair, Richie thinks- is new. But it’s nice, like there’s hope that the Losers can have lives that aren’t permanently saturated in supernatural trauma, like they have a chance at something resembling a happily ever after.

She looks at Eddie, who is rattling off her amendments to one of the aforementioned two healthy options to a waitress who looks like she really isn’t getting paid enough for this, and Richie pities her, really, but she can’t help smiling. It’s weirdly domestic like this, she thinks. If Beverly is outspoken, Eddie Kaspbrak has a fucking megaphone to her mouth at all times, and uses it only to call it the way she sees it. She’s always loved spending time with Eddie, watching her fight the world with her tiny fists like she wasn’t going to grab her inhaler and container of sugar pills immediately after, and she retroactively thinks she does that with Beverly’s same doe eyes and pink cheeks.

“Trashmouth,” Eddie interrupts her reverie. She blinks and locks gazes. “Where you at?”

The ‘ _are you okay_ ’ is unspoken, and it makes Richie’s heart lurch. 

“Right here,” she promises a little too seriously. Eddie starts to look actually worried, so she reaches across the table and grasps her wrist to squeeze it briefly. “Just thinking about…”

“Don’t.”

“I mean, if you have to know…”

“Do not, Rachel.”

Richie grins. “Your mom.”

It’s silent for about a second before Eddie grabs a fistful of utensils, ready to slam them as she whisper shouts, “fuck you, Richie!” But it’s heatless, and the laughter around the table softens it further. Eddie sets down the tableware with a disdainful look Richie’s way. “You’re such a fucking moron, why do I associate myself with you.”

“I’m a treasure!”

When the table settles down and breaks into separate conversations, and the waitress reappears to finally take Richie’s order, Beverly looks at her curiously. She’s never been as prying as Stan, but only because she’s never had to be. Richie wonders how much of that is some freaky Deadlights hyper-intuition, and how much is just Beverly being smarter and cooler and better than all of them combined.

Beverly looks at Richie like she knows, and Richie shrugs, because she probably does. 

“Does anyone have plans after this?” she hears Mike ask as the waitress leaves. Richie tries to sip at her too-hot coffee, burns her tongue- duh- and ignores Eddie’s snort of unshocked amusement as well as the way that makes her heart swell.

“I’m supposed to be on tour,” Richie says automatically. It’s the first time she’s even considered her career since she landed in Maine. She wonders how many calls she’s missed from Frank, who’s number she promptly blocked the first night at the townhouse. “At this point I’ll probably just cancel it.”

Eddie shrugs. “I work remotely, so I’m not too worried.”

“I have a movie to finish,” Bill mumbles, as if that isn’t the coolest thing ever. 

“Dude, that’s… the coolest thing ever.”

Bill shrugs. “Does anyone else feel like… going back to normal is gonna be so weird?” The Losers share nervous glances among themselves. Patty looks a little confused, so Bill continues. “It’s not my place to tell you everything, but… we all went through some shit back in Derry.” 

He pauses, looking around the group with pained eyes. “My little brother died there when he was really little,” he says softly. Mike reaches across the table to grab his forearm and squeeze. “I repressed it, I think, after we left. All of it. When we were kids, I made these guys help me search for him for a whole y… year.” Bill shakes his head and wipes at his eyes with his free hand. “But he was… dead.” He’s not looking at them anymore, just straight down into his coffee. “The Losers…”

“I know you were bullied,” Patty deflects helpfully. Bill’s gaze snaps up, not shocked, but wondering. Hazily coming back to the present. “Richie and I talked a little last night.”

Richie shrugs. “Yeah, but I feel like when we call ourselves Losers unironically that isn’t really shocking,” she jokes halfheartedly. Bill chuckles under his breath. She waves around the table theatrically- but she’s still holding back, keeping her eyes above the water. She knows this isn’t a joke. “Hi, my name’s Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier, and I was bullied for being a dyke when I was thirteen.”

Beverly grabs her hand under the table, and Richie’s very grateful. The boys look sad. Eddie looks pale, and also sad. “Rich,” she starts, but Richie cuts her off.

“The Bowers gang caught me looking at a girl once and never let me live it down,” she explains with a tight smile. She looks at Patty when she adds, “Stanley never let me go to the arcade alone after that happened.”

Patty looks devastated, but she smiles, friendly and encouraging. Richie really fucking likes Stan’s wife. 

“My mom was crazy,” Eddie mumbles. The table quiets. “She made me think I was sick my entire life, had me take fake meds and carry two fake inhalers everywhere.” She’s staring at her water. “So that was fun to remember.”

Under the table, Richie knocks ankles with Eddie. Their eyes meet, and the corners of Eddie’s lips quirk into something like a tiny smile, not quite reaching her eyes, but she doesn’t look so far away and haunted. Richie counts it as a win. 

“None of you remembered any of that?” Patty asks. Richie glances her way. She looks nervous, like she’s walking the thin, and maybe nonexistent, line between too much information and not enough. Richie knows it well. 

“I did,” Mike says. “But I never left Derry.” Patty frowns, so he continues. “Derry’s… a very backwards town,” he explains, and what guts Richie about this is that even post-clown, he isn’t fucking lying. “Socially. Culturally. Even today, it’s… there’s a large homophobic, racist, sexist presence there. It really hasn’t changed much since we were kids. I stayed because someone had to take over my grandfather’s farm when he passed, and when we ended up closing the farm down, I just… moved further into town. I was already there, you know?”

Patty looks like she has a million more questions, but she just nods gratefully. “I’m glad he has you guys,” she says. “Stanley… I mean, we have friends, work friends, social friends, but he’s very…”

“Shy?” Richie tries. Patty giggles. “A homebody?” She pauses with a cursory glance around the table, visibly reading the room, before she adds, “An uptight little shit?”

That makes Patty laugh. It’s the most serene she’s looked since they arrived. “Something like that,” she allows. 

“We kinda forced him to be our friend, I think,” Richie tells her.

Bill shakes his head. “No.” Richie cocks her head to the side, and Bill just snorts. “He let us be _his_ friends.”

Richie laughs. Then she nods, because he’s right. 

The group exits the iHop in spurts. Mike is the first to go, because there’s a first for everything, and also because Mike has already started seriously looking to relocate far, far from Derry, and has realtors to talk to. Ben gets a work related call a little while later, as does Bill, leaving the girls to gossip about them for a solid ten minutes before Eddie starts to head out, too. Richie plans to stay a little longer and finish her second coffee, but Beverly kicks her hard under the table and nods her head Eddie’s way. Richie rolls her eyes, but she jumps up, says her goodbyes, and bounds out the door after her. 

“Heya, Eduardo!”

“I literally just saw you, dipshit.” Eddie stops though, allowing Richie to catch up with her. “Hey, do you know what you’re gonna do after…?”

Richie shrugs, stuffing her hands into her pockets. “Not really,” she admits. “I think I need a new manager? The one I have now hates my guts- which is fair, I guess, because I kinda hate his- and I really think this week was the last straw for him.” Eddie snorts. “Otherwise, it’s just gonna be… back to the comedic grind, you know?”

Eddie’s quiet for a minute. They walk in silence back to the Day’s Inn down the street from the hospital, where Richie’s been told her belongings have been unceremoniously dumped for safe keeping. They only got two rooms and split them, not quite boys vs girls- she’s been told Eddie roomed with Bill, technically- but they all ended up sharing the room with the others anyway. Richie doesn’t blame them. She doesn’t exactly want to break from the group just yet, either. 

“Hey, Richie?” Eddie’s got that serious voice on- something like a customer service voice, but uncomfortably professional. 

“Yeah, Eddie Spaghetti?”

Eddie sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. “You know what, I changed my mind. Nothing.”

“No!” Richie faux wails, grasping Eddie’s arm with both hands and shaking her gently. “You have to tell me, the suspense is killing me!”

Eddie gives her a Look, and she quiets, letting go of her arm and doing her best to look sheepish. “I was gonna ask you if I…” She pauses, eyes flicking down to the pavement, then straight ahead, staring into the middle distance. “If I could, uh… stay with… you? For a little while?”

Richie’s heart stops. It comes to a screeching halt right in her chest, she’s fucking certain of that, she has to be dying right now because in what world does Eddie Kaspbrak want to live with her? “You wanna…”

“Look, it’s fine if you can’t… I get it, I know you’re busy, and it’s last minute, but… I can always ask someone else-”

“You can stay,” Richie blurts out, cutting off that train of thought and killing it where it stands. “Duh. Of course, Eds, I’d be honored.”

Eddie looks unsure, or like she really wants to tell Richie not to call her that- it’s probably both. “I don’t wanna intrude,” she mumbles. 

“Are you fucking serious?” Richie stops them both, stepping right in front of Eddie and grabbing her shoulders, forcing her to look Richie dead in the eyes. “You’re my best friend, idiot. Since, like, first grade. And don’t give me any of that ‘but we forgot each other for like two decades’ bullshit, because even if I didn’t know who you were, I knew there was some hypochondriac little kid I grew up with out there who would resurrect me just to kill me herself if I died of lung cancer from smoking so much, so I knew you existed, and I knew you mattered to me.” She pauses to breathe, watching Eddie’s face carefully as something she can’t place blooms in her eyes, the soft part of her mouth when she sighs that she tries not to dwell on. “I’d do fucking anything for you, fucknuts, don’t be stupid.”

“It’s not stupid.”

“It’s pretty stupid!”

Eddie laughs at that, breaking her gaze away to look down at her feet, cheeks turning faintly pink, and oh, Richie thinks she’s having a heart attack. 

“I just don’t want to be alone yet,” Eddie whispers. Richie doesn’t mention the fact that she’s married. “Everything I thought I knew is different now. I’ve remembered shit I didn’t know I’d forgotten.” She pauses, chewing at her bottom lip. “But at the same time, it’s like… nothing’s changed.”

“We’ve changed,” Richie supplies, and as loathe as she is to really accept it, she thinks she’s right. They’re fucking forty years old now. They aren’t weird little preteens anymore, hanging out in fragile underground clubhouses and sharing hammocks to read the latest issue of Spider-Man together, riding bikes to Bill’s house for another Club Meeting, going to bar mitzvahs and sweet sixteens and ditching senior prom together to get Burger King for dinner. Richie’s knees give her hell now. She’s wrinkling and her widow’s peak hairline is too pronounced to ever not have bangs and still think she looks decent. 

Eddie looks older, too, but she’s always had worry lines and stressed, tired eyes. She was forty when they were fourteen. 

“We’ve been through some shit,” Richie sums up helpfully. 

That makes Eddie laugh, and this time, it reaches her eyes. “Tell me about it.”

Eddie leads the way up to their hotel room, Richie following like the goddamn puppy dog she’s always been around her. She unlocks the door with a keycard and ushers Richie inside, where Richie promptly launches herself face first onto the nearest bed. 

"Dumbass," she hears Eddie mutter affectionately. Her heart warms.

-

Of all the early Saturday mornings she’s flown ‘home’ to LA, this has got to be the worst of them. 

She doesn’t cry at the airport, per se. She might hide her tears in Stanley’s neck when she hugs him goodbye at the hospital and promises to call- no really this time, she has his number and he’s fucked. Doomed, even. 

At the airport, she hugs Mike and wishes him luck moving out, gives Ben and Beverly at least a thousand obnoxious winks and finger guns as the Losers walk her to her terminal like they’re her goddamn parents- which they may as well be, she thinks- until Bev gets fed up and pulls her into a tight hug, whispering, “Be careful, dumbass,” with an affectionate little smile. Bill hugs her tight, and she really thinks that may be what breaks her, but she just squeezes him back and promises to annoy him to death, too. 

“But only if you cast me in your next movie,” she amends with a smirk. 

“Richie, they only cast actors in movies.”

“I can act!” Bill looks unimpressed. “I acted like I was straight for years!”

“You didn’t do a very good job.”

Richie shoves him by the shoulder with a loud laugh. He’s right, though. She looks at Eddie and it smacks her in the fucking face- she possesses the subtlety of a freight train about to crash into another freight train. 

“I’ll see you soon, yeah?”

Eddie nods and gives her a lopsided little smile, one that shows her dimples, but reaches no further. Wordlessly Richie steps forward and wraps her into a hug, settling her chin on the top of Eddie’s head when she tucks into the crook of her neck and sighs. This is familiar, she thinks. It’s good. She could live like this. 

It’s a frightening last thought to have before letting her go and boarding a plane headed across the country, but she smiles and waves as she crosses the threshold anyway. 

Richie feels the loss instantaneously, but fuck Bill, because she’s a fantastic actress, hand to God. She’s polite with the flight attendants who usher her onto the plane, to the mom and her kid who insists on taking the window seat. She pops in her earbuds and presses shuffle on her music and just sits there, pretending it’s fine that she’s headed back to California. 

It’s not. She fucking hates California, hates it so bad that she pays for the shitty airplane wifi just to text-

_To: Eddie Spaghetti_

_i might just move to ny after this lol_

_From: Eddie Spaghetti_

_How are you sending me this_

_To: Eddie Spaghetti_

_airline wifi exists bruh_

_From: Eddie Spaghetti_

_Don’t call me that._

_You want to live in NY?_

Richie thinks about it for a second. She’s not particularly attached to New York, truthfully, but the fact of the matter is that New York is not California, and New York City is not Los Angeles, which is really all it takes at this point for Richie to want to run toward it with open arms.

_To: Eddie Spaghetti_

_idk. i don’t want to live in LA tho_

_From: Eddie Spaghetti_

_There are lots of cities that are not LA_

Richie’s gut response is to say, ‘but you’re in New York,’ which she absolutely does not fucking say. 

She thinks about it long and hard, though, and it makes her stomach twist into terrifying knots and her heart thump so hard it feels like it’s trying to escape her body through her throat. Eddie could live on fucking Mars and she’d sign herself right up to live in space. 

_To: Eddie Spaghetti_

_yeah but ny is closest to y’all losers_

_From: Eddie Spaghetti_

_Did you just say y’all_

_I’m blocking your number_

_To: Eddie Spaghetti_

_no don’t go ily_

_From: Eddie Spaghetti_

_You’re an idiot and I hate you._

_To: Eddie Spaghetti_

_nahhhhh you LIKE me_

_From: Eddie Spaghetti_

_Shut the fuck up dickwad._

Richie snorts at her phone and pockets it. Radio Ga Ga comes on shuffle and she cranks that shit in her ears, hopes the mom next to her likes Queen, and closes her eyes. 

When she opens her eyes it’s to Led Zeppelin blaring, and a flight attendant hesitantly nudging her shoulder to wake her up. 

Nice. 

She grabs her shit from the overhead compartment, slings her duffel bag over her shoulder, and follows the leader off the plane, immediately whipping out her phone as soon as she makes it out of the crowd.

_From: Eddie Spaghetti_

_If you really want to move out here, I can help you find a place. If you want._

_I’m probably going to be looking for a new place, too._

Richie’s heart swells with something dangerous and strong, and for once, she doesn’t shove it down. She’s alone in LAX looking through texts from her childhood crush she just remembered this past fucking Tuesday, and the only people judging her are the paparazzi that love to hate her guts, which she really doesn’t care about. 

_To: Eddie Spaghetti_

_the eagle has landed_

_omg we can be roommates_

On her way out of the airport she flips off a photographer who points their camera her way with a bright smile. It’s a long walk to her car, but she feels like prolonging the inevitable, so she walks and texts like she’s been told not to do. 

_From: Eddie Spaghetti_

_Bill said to say “oh my god, they were roommates”_

_To: Eddie Spaghetti_

_tell bill i said he’s a sellout_

_From: Eddie Spaghetti_

_That doesn’t even make sense_

_To: Eddie Spaghetti_

_ur mom doesn’t make sense_

_From: Eddie Spaghetti_

_You can’t make that joke because it’s true_

Richie throws her head back and laughs, shaking with it, then stuffs her phone in her back pocket, rummaging through her duffel for her car keys. She climbs in and drives like hell.

Frank is, as it happens, not fucking pleased with her right now.

“The California dates were going to be your biggest fucking shows!” he shouts at her over the phone. Richie turns down the volume on her car’s Bluetooth with a wince. “You better have a good fucking reason for this, because the people are going to want something to explain why you just fucking disappeared for a week-”

“Three days,” Richie amends.

“ _Fuck you_!”

“No thanks. Also, you’re fired?” It’s not a question, but Frank goes silent. “Look, man, we fucking hate each other, I’m just gonna… whatever, I don’t actually care. Go find another comedian to not write their own jokes and make bank off of stupid ass dude bro comedy so I don’t have to demean my gender for the clicks anymore, kapeesh? Also, you’re kind of an asshole. And for the record, my best fucking friend since kindergarten was in the fucking hospital, so go fuck yourself, too.”

Richie hangs up, and breathes.

-

“I need a new manager,” Richie says to her phone in mild distress.

Eddie’s pixelated face looks unimpressed. “You knew you’d need one when you fired your old one, right?”

“I mean, yeah, but…” 

“Richie, you’re already, like, famous. It can’t be that hard to find a new manager.”

“I’m not that famous.”

“Dude, you’re on Netflix.”

Richie shrugs. “Whatever, man. How’s New York?”

“Fine,” Eddie mutters. “Meeting ran long, but I did get to talk about possibly relocating for a while. Now I’m just crashing at Bill’s.” Richie must look like she wants to ask questions, because Eddie sighs and says, “I’ll tell you about it later, okay? Just… I need a minute to figure things out.”

“Of course.” 

“So should I look for flights to California now, or do you want a little privacy to have your comedic breakdown?”

“My what?” 

“You know, the one you’re about to have now that you’ve remembered you’re not fucking funny.”

That makes Richie laugh out loud, head thrown back with a loud whoop. “Oh, Eds, why aren’t you the comedian here?”

“The insults write themselves, dude.”

“Fair.” Richie takes a bite of her pepperoni pizza, and does her best to cover her mouth while she chews to avoid Eddie’s disgusted glares. “You sure you wanna fly out here? LAX is fucking crowded as hell, especially this time of year.”

“You trying to convince me not to come?” Richie shakes her head hard- perhaps a little too earnestly, so she amends it by pretending to look caught until Eddie rolls her eyes. “I’d drive, but I literally just got into a car accident last week, and I’m not driving across the entire country by myself.” 

Richie nods understandingly. “No, I get it. Just let me know when you’re landing, I’ll come pick you up.” 

“You’re still a fucking terrible driver-”

“Hell yeah, baby!”

Eddie looks pained. “Maybe I’ll just call an Uber.”

Richie laughs through another bite of pizza. She has the decency to finish chewing before actually speaking again, but damn it, Eddie’s cute when she’s pissed at her. “I’m not making you pay for a ride, dummy, you’ll just have to put up with my shitty driving.”

“Yeah, whatever.” 

It’s raining when Eddie’s flight lands at LAX. It’s like God is laughing at Richie, taunting her with romantic cliches paired with how soft and tired Eddie looks when she finds her, dragging a suitcase behind her. She’s wearing the same gray hoodie and dark sweatpants, but some fucking how she still looks impeccably put together. 

It’s annoying. 

They hug, and Richie holds on for what she thinks might be a little too long, but Eddie doesn’t seem to mind- she blinks at her when Richie pulls away, like she forgot where they were, almost looks a little annoyed they aren’t hugging anymore but Richie doesn’t let herself think about that- and they’re off. 

It’s pretty underwhelming at Richie’s house. She’s got more space than she knows what to do with, half the rooms are usable but filled with shit, and the rest of the place is nearly empty. Eddie claims the guest bedroom, and Richie tells her to take a nap.

“M’not tired,” Eddie yawns.

“Nice try. Get some sleep, nerd.”

“You’re a nerd.”

“Yeah.” Eddie rolls her eyes, but relents and shuffles to bed. “Sweet dreams!” She flips her off before shutting the door. 

While Eddie sleeps, Richie has the majority of her crisis. It’s not like she’s shared any place with anyone since her only friend in LA moved in with her husband and Richie found her own house in 2012. It’s a fucking mess, so she tries to clean up at least the spaces she knows Eddie will be in- the kitchen, the bathrooms, the living room. She hasn’t had to worry about her house being livable in years- or ever. 

But even then, this isn’t just anyone, this is Eddie- which is good because she likes Eddie (an understatement) but it’s also bad, because Eddie is a germaphobe on steroids, even now. The damage has already been done well overboard. She’s probably more sterile than a fucking surgeon. 

She’d make a badass surgeon, Richie thinks. 

By the time Eddie wakes up she’s calming down from her second panic attack about the fact that Eddie is staying in her house, Eddie is here- no, Eddie wants to be here. She still looks sleepy as she walks into the living room where Richie’s plopped on the couch flicking through boring channels. Richie stares resolutely ahead at the TV and tries to will away her very fucking obvious heart eyes.

“You hungry?” Richie asks, because it’s almost 7 o’clock, and she thinks this is when normal people eat dinner. She doesn’t exactly know what normal schedules are supposed to look like anymore, either.

“A little.” Eddie seats herself next to Richie and curls up, stuffing her hands in her hoodie pockets. “S’nice here.”

Richie shrugs. “Yeah, I guess. I’m not really here much.” She sits up on the edge of the couch, watching as Eddie tucks herself into the corner of it, wrapping her arms around her knees. “Want some spaghetti, Eddie?”

“I hate you so much.”

“Would you kill me if I just ordered takeout?” Eddie shrugs. Richie sits back a little, not quite intruding into Eddie’s personal bubble, but visibly acknowledging that it’s there. “You alright?”

“Are you?”

“Can’t argue with that,” Richie mutters with a little nod, and stands from the couch. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry. I get it.” She sighs, hovering by the couch, and doesn’t quite meet Eddie’s sad eyes. “I just… I’m here for you, yeah?”

Eddie nods, tight lipped and distressed. Richie’s going to punch herself in the face.

“Takeout’s fine,” Eddie says.

Richie tosses her the printed out menu to her favorite Chinese place and opens Postmates on her phone, scrolling to place an order. She orders something greasy and disgusting that her entire body will despise her for for the next week and a half, along with something stupid healthy for Eddie. They’re silent for a while, Richie pacing and texting the delivery guy for updates, when Eddie finally breaks it. 

“I’m getting a divorce,” she says.

Richie pauses her pacing and freezes dead in her tracks, looking to Eddie somewhat like a deer in headlights. She blinks, tries to pretend like her heart isn’t trying to beat directly out of her chest, do not pass go do not collect two hundred dollars, and swallows hard. 

“What?” Richie croaks.

“I’m getting a divorce,” Eddie repeats, but this time she keeps talking at a speed Richie’s kind of impressed she can still keep up with. “Being in Derry reminded me… I remembered everything my mom did, every single way she fucked me up for life, and I realized that I just… married the rich guy version of her and I’m so fucking miserable. We both are, I think, cause he really just wants some fucking arm candy wife to nod and smile at everything he says and I…” She shakes her head violently, her voice going very small. “That’s not me, that could never be me, and I’m so fucking _pissed_ that I ended up marrying the same thing I ran away from Derry to escape. I literally forgot that my mom abused me for my entire childhood, what the fuck is wrong with me?”

Richie doesn’t know what to say, like anything she has to say means anything right now. What she does is drop her phone on the couch and sit beside Eddie, hovering cautiously until Eddie rolls her eyes and sits up, then wraps her arms tightly around her like she can absorb the way Eddie’s shaking and keep her from breaking apart any further.

“I talked to my lawyer in New York,” she whispers quickly. “He’s gonna email me some documents- do you have a printer? And do you know where the nearest post office is, cause I don't want to go back to New York, not yet-”

“Yes, and yes,” Richie cuts her off gently. Eddie stares at the floor. “Hey.”

“Sorry, I didn’t want to dump all this shit on you at once.”

“You’re not dumping anything on me,” Richie insists. “Look at me, Eds.” She doesn’t. “Eddie, c’mon.” She shakes her head. “Please?”

Slowly, Eddie tilts her head just enough to look Richie in the eyes. Her heart breaks.

“I told you,” Richie says slowly, putting emphasis on every word. “I’d do fucking _anything_ for you. I wasn’t just talking out of my ass, okay, I may do that a lot but I’m so goddamn serious right now. You don’t have to explain anything to me, or bottle up that shit, or whatever the fuck. You’re here.” Richie shifts her grip on Eddie to squeeze her shoulders. “And I’m here. For you.”

Eddie opens her mouth to speak, but immediately snaps it shut, just nods a few times with grateful eyes. She kind of looks like she’s about to cry, but she ducks her head into Richie’s neck before Richie can say more heartfelt bullshit.

The doorbell rings, and the moment is broken.

-

“So wait, who writes your jokes?”

Richie tries not to choke on her chicken lo mein when she snorts. “Some dude bros from east LA, like… Caden Anderson was one guy? I forget. They both fucking suck.”

“Dude bros wrote your comedy,” Eddie wheezes. “Oh my god, of course they did. Jesus Christ.”

Richie rolls her eyes, and does her best to look at least mildly offended, but it’s kind of hard when Eddie’s smiling at her from across the table and looking worlds more comfortable now at Richie’s kitchen table than she did minutes before on the couch. “I don’t think I’ve officially fired them? I should. Don’t know if that should be before or after I find a manager, but it’s gotta be pretty fucking high up on my list.” 

“Have you ever even tried writing your own jokes?” 

Richie shrugs and looks down into her take out. “Eh. They’re not very good.”

“Well, yeah, but that wasn’t the question.” When Richie glances up, Eddie looks curious, almost sad. Weird. 

“I used to,” Richie says. “But the big wigs don’t like ‘em. They don’t ‘fit my demographic’ or whatever the fuck. Didn’t appeal to the masses. Wouldn’t rake in money to the cash cow that is, apparently, Hollywood comedians.”

Eddie makes a face. “That’s stupid.” She pauses, head cocked to the side as she thinks. “Can I hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“Your original jokes, fuckwad. What do you think?”

“Oh.” Richie shrugs again, gaze dropping to her noodles, the floor, the wall, the refrigerator, which is suddenly the most interesting thing in the room. Cool. “I mean, you said it yourself, my jokes are shitty-”

“I said that because our friendship is built almost entirely on talking shit to each other,” Eddie deadpans. When Richie looks at her again, she looks vaguely unimpressed, brows furrowed together in concentration. “Like, yeah, you make too many jokes about my dead mom, but I don’t actually think that’s what your comedy is built on.” She pauses. “Is it?”

“No, but the dude bro’s comedy definitely was.”

“So what’s yours, Richie Tozier?” Eddie dares. It’s a challenge. “It can’t be as bad as it was when you were a weird teen who only did bad voices.”

“My voices were and are a gift!”

“Sure.”

Richie goes quiet after that, twirling her chopsticks around in her noodles. The last person she’d shown a single original bit to was Frank about two years ago, and it had gone nowhere, as expected. She hadn’t even considered writing her own material now. 

But Frank’s out of the picture. Everything is different now. 

Time to rebrand. 

Richie gets up without a word and scurries back into the living room, grabbing her phone off the couch and scrolling through her phone notes.

“Rich?”

“You have to be nice to me,” Richie says when she returns, pacing this time in front of the kitchen table. She braces herself against the counter for a brief second, definitely feels a little sick, but whether it’s her fried dinner or nerves is anyone’s guess. Probably both. “Because I wrote this a while ago, and the last person I showed it to didn’t like it, so it’s… not good? I don’t know. My manager was a little bastard, I hated that guy.”

She turns around, and Eddie’s sitting cross-legged on her chair, looking at her expectantly. “Well? Hit me with it, Trashmouth.”

Richie takes a slow, deep breath. Her eyes scan the kitchen, and without a word she crosses it to open the fridge and grab a bottle of beer, then returns to her place in front of Eddie and holds it like it’s a microphone and she’s in her childhood bedroom with a hairbrush, pretending to be a pop star. 

“So I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 22, which surprised absolutely fucking no one who knows me.”

Eddie’s face morphs into something between surprise and I fucking knew it, and oh, this is going to be good. 

“It was so shitty, though, I was 22 years old, do you know how many years of school I didn’t know I had ADHD? Here’s a hint: it was all of them. All of them! And I have the hyperactive type! I am on all levels except physical the hyperactive little boy stereotype about ADHD, and no one thought anything of it- except for, like, my mom.”

She pauses, gauging Eddie’s reaction carefully from behind her beer microphone. Eddie’s covering her mouth with both hands, eyebrows rocketing up to her hairline. 

“My mom told every pediatrician I ever saw growing up that she thought I might have something. And she’d describe my problems, like, I was having trouble paying attention in class, I wasn’t doing my schoolwork, I couldn’t stay on task, I was always forgetting things and fidgeting. She once told me a story about when I was a kid, when I was in kindergarten. I was like, five years old, and I stopped doing my classwork. I would just leave blank papers in my little cubby. So my teacher and my mom asked me, hey, why aren’t you doing your work? And this is not a joke, I told them, ‘I already know that. I’m bored.’”

Eddie huffs and pinches the bridge of her nose, but her dimples are showing. 

“And nobody thought that was a problem!” Richie exclaims. “Five years old, I knew how to read. I was reading chapter books when I was, like, six- you know, short ones, that’s fine. But I was bored all the time, and that didn’t change. So when I got older the problem was, I didn’t know what I was doing anymore. Like, yeah, it’s not a problem that I don’t do my homework when it’s “what letter comes after A” or some shit, but then I’m 16 years old and I know fuck all about geometry and I’m bored? Now we have a problem!

“But no, I was a smart kid. I got decent grades. I took one honors class in high school, it was sophomore English. All my friends were honors students, fucking smartasses.” 

Eddie rolls her eyes. 

“English was one of my favorite subjects, though, I liked to read, I liked to write. But I barely passed that class. You know what the doctor told me I had that year? Anxiety.” She pauses, looking around the room in dramatic silence, then leans in and whisper shouts, “ _well no shit, Angela_!”

That’s when Eddie snorts. Her hand claps over her mouth to try and muffle it, but it’s too late. 

Eddie Kaspbrak just laughed at her joke. 

“I can’t pay attention in the only class I actually like, I _am_ anxious!” Richie finishes, doing absolutely nothing to hide the massive, shit eating grin blossoming over her face. “Good work, McGyver!”

There’s a moment of silence and badly repressed laughter that follows the bit, when Eddie finally squeaks, “why the fuck was that funny?” Richie’s laughing now, too, and Eddie keeps rambling through red cheeks and a signature annoyed grin. “Oh, _fuck you_ , that’s not bad. And fuck Frank, honestly. What the hell!” 

Richie leans back against the counter as she laughs, setting the beer down behind her. “I’ve got so much dumb shit like that,” she mutters. “Really honed my craft over the years, you know?”

Eddie rolls her eyes. “It needs some work,” she declares. “But that’s, like… _good_ , Richie. That’s so good.” She pauses, then makes a waving motion in Richie’s direction. 

“What?”

“Keep going. I know you have more.”

Richie snorts, turns around and fishes for a bottle opener out of a stray drawer, pops open her beer and takes a long sip, then turns around and does exactly that.

-

They fall into a weird sort of routine over the weeks. Eddie helps her on her hunt for decent representation, cooks a few times a week so Richie doesn’t die of malnutrition- it’s a fucking miracle she hasn’t already- and critiques her jokes as she writes them. In return Richie lends Eddie her printer, shows her around town, and repeatedly promises that she can stay as long as she likes. Maybe longer. 

The idea of moving in together has popped into Richie’s head about a billion times, but she hasn’t said a fucking word. Being in the same space as Eddie is overwhelming and wonderful, but it’s maybe been two months since she remembered Eddie existed. 

Still, it’s undeniable that they coexist well. 

Unfortunately for her- or, at least, Richie feels pretty unfortunate about it- her friends know she’s full of shit and some of them aren’t afraid to call her on it. And by some of them, she does mean Stanley fucking Uris. 

“So you live together now.”

Richie flinches. “Yes,” she says calmly.

“It’s been a couple months.”

“Like… two, yes.”

“She left her husband to move in with you.”

“That’s not why-” Richie starts to yell, but immediately quiets down and readjusts her earbuds. She gives Stan’s pixelated face a dirty look. “That’s not _why_.”

“Sure.” Before Richie can insist any further, he continues. “You’re the only person who doesn’t think she’s into you, you do know that, right?”

“Shut up,” Richie mumbles.

“I won’t, because you keep moping about it like she’s not right fucking there and very interested- like, I know you’re blind, but you’re not this stupid, Richie.”

“My stupidity knows no bounds, Staniel, we both know this.”

Stan pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs. “Couldn’t you at least talk to her about it like a normal fucking person?” 

Richie huffs. “For one, since when am I normal?” she laughs. “And two…” She pauses, glancing down the hall nervously. Eddie’s blasting some obnoxious 80’s Halloween music while she bakes fucking brownies like this, any of this, is normal. “We just found each other again. She just got a divorce. Dude, she’s my best friend in the whole world, I’m not going to fuck that up just because…”

“Because you’re madly in love with her and it’s ruining your life?”

“Yeah, what I’m _not_ about to tell her is that.”

Stan groans. “You two are so fucking difficult,” he complains. “Will you at least think about it? Seriously? I can only take so much of you bitching about your very much requited love.”

 _No_ , she thinks. “Sure,” she says. 

When Richie joins Eddie in the kitchen, the Monster Mash is playing from Eddie’s phone, and she’s licking the spoon covered in brownie batter before setting it in the sink with the mixing bowl. “Dude, isn’t that some kind of health risk?” Richie teases. “You’re gonna get salmonella.”

Eddie flips her off, then turns to the sink and grabs a wet sponge. “Shut the fuck up, you sound like my mother.”

Richie knows she’s joking, but not one part of that sentence sits right with her. She walks over and leans on one of the cabinets, searching Eddie’s face with a worried, bitten lip. “I’m kidding, Eds,” she says softly. “Beep beep, me, it wasn’t funny.”

That makes Eddie pause. She drops the sponge into the sink and looks at Richie, something unreadable but distinctly frustrated in her wide eyes as they scan Richie’s face. “I know,” she replies. “You make jokes like that all the time. I’d be more worried if you stopped, to be honest.” 

“Yeah, but…” Richie shrugs, gaze dropping to the counter. “I don’t know. Your mom was full of shit, that’s all.”

It’s quiet. The sink stops running, and then there’s a faintly damp hand on Richie’s cheek, nudging her face until she looks Eddie in the eyes again.

“I know,” Eddie repeats. It looks a bit like fondness, Richie thinks. “You may be a dumbass but you’re nothing like my mother. You know that, right?”

Richie nods, and finally, Eddie cracks a tiny smile.

“Butthead,” Eddie murmurs. “Go get the candy and put it by the door, will you? I set out a bowl for it.”

Richie tries not to dwell on the look on Eddie’s face. She goes to sleep far too late past midnight thinking about it.

-

It’s always the same dream. The same memory.

_They’re in the cistern, and Eddie’s run through with It’s massive spider claw. Blood spurts from her chest onto Richie’s face and neck and glasses, gushes from Eddie’s mouth as she mumbles a soft, shaky, “Richie,” and it shatters her heart into nothing._

_“Eddie-”_

_“Did you really save me?” Eddie whispers. Richie’s eyes blow wide in horror._

_Suddenly it’s Eddie’s eyes that have glossed over stark white, like Bev’s did twenty seven years ago, like Richie supposes hers did in that cistern. Blood drips up her face in the pattern of It’s stupid fucking clown makeup, up from the corners of her mouth to her eyes as she sneers at Richie. She’s pinning down Richie with force, and it’s decidedly not hot, because this is not Eddie._

_“Eds-”_

_“It’s all just a dream!” Eddie laughs, but it’s not Eddie’s laugh by a long shot. “Time to float, Richie!”_

_There are hands on Richie’s neck now, squeezing forcefully. She can’t breathe. Another hand covers her mouth, She thrashes, but she’s pinned completely. This is not Eddie. She tries to scream._

_“Time to float!”_

“Eddie!”

She gasps for air, gulps a fucking lungful and a half, and her eyes fly wide open. It’s dark, and kind of cold. The world is fuzzy, but from the faint light coming through her window she can make out the shape of her room. 

This is getting very old, very fast. 

Suddenly her bedroom door is flying open, and the lights are on. Richie squeezes her eyes shut against the brightness and covers her face with both hands. “What-”

“Are you okay?!” Eddie demands, rushing to the side of the bed. When Richie’s eyes adjust, she opens them and squints at Eddie’s blurry form, then grabs her glasses from her bedside table and frowns at her. “Dude, you screamed bloody murder just a fucking second ago.”

Richie blinks. “Oh. Uh, sorry.”

“Don’t be a dipshit,” Eddie mumbles and sits on the side of the bed. “Are you okay?”

She’s not. “Yeah, m’fine, just had a really shitty dream.”

“I’ll fucking say.” Eddie pauses, fists the comforter in one hand and stares down at it. “You said my name.”

Richie feels the blood drain from her face. “Uh.” Eddie looks up at her, and the look of frustrated concern is clear. “Bad dream, I swear.”

Eddie manages a tight laugh. “Fucking sounded like it. Sounded like you were being killed.” Richie must flinch, because the frown on Eddie’s face deepens, fist clenching tighter in the sheets. 

Richie swallows. “It was… what I saw in the Deadlights.” Her voice is barely above a whisper, and it cracks with feeling. “I keep. Dreaming about it, but worse.”

“Worse?”

“Yeah, dude, this time It fucking possessed you and tried to kill me,” Richie blurts out. She looks down into her lap, eyes squeezing shut and hands flying to run through her messy hair nervously. “It’s… fine. I’m fine.”

“Bullshit,” Eddie says. She’s not wrong. 

Richie falls silent. Eddie stands and walks to the door, clicking the light off, and Richie sighs. Then she’s being shoved to the other side of the bed, and when she looks up Eddie’s crawling right into bed next to her. 

“I’m not leaving you alone like this,” Eddie explains quietly, eyes darting away. Richie just hands over her glasses and nods.

“Alright.”

Richie hears a clink as Eddie sets the glasses on her bedside table, then feels the bed dip as she sinks into bed next to her. She rolls onto her back and sighs heavily, eyes slipping shut. 

“I have nightmares about it, too.” 

Her eyes fly open again, staring blankly at the dark, fuzzy ceiling. 

“Not… not as visceral as that shit, I don’t think, but I…” Eddie inhales sharply, sighs it out. “A lot of the time it’s you in the Deadlights, though. Trapped in it. Sometimes it kills you, and…” It’s silent for a terrifying moment before Eddie finishes. “I can never wake you up.”

Richie rolls onto her side to face Eddie, who’s on her back and staring straight up with wide, horrified eyes. She reaches over and places a hand on her bicep, just the gentle weight of it. “I’m here,” she promises, and squeezes lightly. “I’m even awake and everything.”

She can barely see it when the corners of Eddie’s lips curl into a smile. 

“Me too,” Eddie whispers. She places her hand over Richie’s and squeezes back. “You’re never getting rid of me now, moron.”

Richie laughs, ducks her head into her pillow to muffle her giggling. “I’ll take my chances.”

She doesn’t dream.

-

Eddie unofficially moves into Richie’s room after that, she thinks- unofficially, of course, because they never talk about it. It just… happens. One night she’s waking up Richie from a nightmare, and it’s like Richie blinks and suddenly they’re sharing a closet.

Fitting, she thinks. 

She gets a new manager, too. It isn’t as painful a process as she feared. Her name is Kayla and she, like Eddie, doesn’t put up with her shit, but not in a mean way. She reads over Richie’s new material and sends her what looks like a five paragraph essay of her thoughts and ideas going forward. She suggests a few standalone shows in Los Angeles to test the new material out, but Richie’s getting restless, and asks for a tour.

“A tour?” Kayla had asked. “You just wrapped a tour.”

“I just cut a tour short, and also, my material wasn’t mine and was really bad.” Richie had been pacing the living room nervously, free hand clenching and unclenching in a tight fist. “Also, I just really want to get out of LA again.”

Kayla said she’d look into it. 

And really, she does want to get out of LA. She always does. She wants to get out now more than ever, but she swears it’s not because of Eddie. Not really.

It’s just the fact that she’s head over heels in fucking love with her best friend in the goddamn universe and it gets harder every day to pretend like she isn’t. Not that, according to every single person she knows, she’s subtle about it at all. It’s fucking suffocating in the simultaneously best and worst way, and Richie doesn’t know what to do about it except run away. Hell, maybe Eddie doesn’t even know.

She has to know, though, right?

“Would you be okay here by yourself?” Richie asks suddenly, brow furrowing at her own self after the fact. They’re eating dinner that same night, Richie had boiled some ravioli because pasta is all Eddie trusts her not to burn just yet. She can’t stop thinking about it.

“What?”

Richie blinks. “Kayla and I are talking about a new tour,” she explains. “Probably wouldn’t be for a little while, but… I mean, I’m not gonna kick you out while I’m gone? Unless you want to leave. I don’t know-”

“Shut up, Richie.”

“Okay.”

Eddie snorts, but her forehead wrinkles up as she frowns. “I mean, you don’t need my permission to tour. If you feel comfortable with me staying here-”

“Yeah, dude, I trust you,” Richie says seriously. Eddie rolls her eyes.

“Then I can stay.” Eddie gets up and puts her empty plate in the sink, rinsing it briefly with water before placing it in the dishwasher. “What dates were you thinking?”

“Not until after the holidays probably,” Richie says. “Not that I ever do anything exciting for Christmas.”

Eddie shrugs. “We could get a tree.”

“Mmm. We should.” Richie smirks. “Hey, aren’t you allergic to pine-”

“Shut the fuck up, asshole,” Eddie grumbles, pretending like she’s not valiantly fighting a smirk. “God, why do I put up with you?” 

“Beats me.” She doesn’t mean for it to happen, but suddenly Richie doesn’t feel like it’s a joke, and she sinks back into her chair a little, fork twirling around the last bit of ravioli in her marinara sauce. 

“Rich?”

“What?” She glances up at Eddie, who’s frowning again. 

“You okay?”

“Yeah!” Eddie folds her arms. “Hey, it’s all good. I feel fine, Edward Spaghedward-”

“That is _seven levels_ of fucking bullshit-”

“See?” Richie laughs, cracking a tiny smile. “Doin’ fine.” 

Eddie gives her a look like she knows Richie’s full of shit- which, to be fair, she pretty much always is- but she doesn’t pry, just nods and turns to walk out of the kitchen. “I’m gonna go lay down,” she says. “Kind of have a headache.”

Richie says nothing. She gets up and dumps the rest of her ravioli into the trash before putting the dirty plate in the dishwasher with her fork, shutting it and saving the actual running of the dishwasher for later. She braces both hands on the counter and sighs, hanging her head and staring down at the smooth granite. 

It’s just going to get harder, she begins to realize. Richie knows she’s not subtle. She’s never been a good liar- she’s still fucking surprised she’d ever convinced the Losers that what scared her most was clowns- not when it comes to what she’s thinking, what she’s feeling. Not when it comes to the truth. 

So Eddie has to know, right? She has to know. 

Another sigh, and Richie pushes herself off from the counter and turns in the direction of the living room, but before she can take a fucking step Eddie Kaspbrak is rushing her at full force, grabbing her shoulders and yanking her violently into a kiss.

Richie stops breathing for the next little while. 

Objectively, it’s a bad kiss. The angle is bad, it’s rough and bruising and their teeth collide- but their teeth collide, and their lips are touching, and Eddie Kaspbrak is kissing her within an inch of her fucking life, and that’s a lot to process in the span of five seconds. Richie’s not sure if she wants to moan or laugh or cry, so she does nothing, just freezes and leans back against the counter where Eddie has her more or less pinned on the spot, still holding her shoulder with a vice-like grip. 

Apparently ‘nothing’ was the wrong reaction, which isn’t surprising- because Eddie stops kissing her, pulls back to scan wide eyes over Richie’s face, not quite meeting her eyes. “I… I’m sorry… I thought-”

Richie blinks. It takes a second for her brain to come back online, and it’s the fear that does it, because _holy fuck_ does she know that fear deeply and intimately. 

_Wait. Eddie doesn’t know?_

“Shut up,” Richie squeaks. Eddie’s expression doesn’t change, if anything the worry deepens. Richie kicks herself mentally. “Fuck. I didn’t mean that.” She inhales sharply, reaching with shaking hands to latch onto Eddie’s waist, keeping her- and herself, really- steady, curling her fingers into the material of Eddie’s shirt. “Do that again.”

“Richie-”

“Please do that again,” she tries desperately. 

Eddie’s mouth falls open in something like shock, which is fair because Richie is generally the last person on the fucking earth anyone would ever expect to ever say please for anything, and immediately snaps back shut in a tight line.

And then she does it again.

This time Richie responds with feeling. She’s not a World Champion Kisser by any means, it’s been maybe a hundred years since she’s met anyone she cared enough about to actually get very far with, so she’s rusty on top of everything. But she tugs Eddie closer by the shirt and tilts her head to deepen the kiss, one palm sliding up Eddie’s back to draw her in- and she’s kissing Eddie, she’s kissing Eddie, Eddie, _Eddie_. This is Eddie- the Eddie she’s been in love with since she figured out that love was a thing, the Eddie that gave Richie her very first gay crisis, the Eddie who’s scared to death of sharing food and splitting drinks and mononucleosis is kissing Richie. It’s Eddie’s hands sliding up her neck to cup her jaw and tug her closer, Eddie’s fingers curling in the hair at the nape of her neck, Eddie’s body pressed flush against her own, Eddie’s lips on her lips, Eddie gasping into her mouth, Eddie kissing her. Eddie is kissing her.

Richie makes a noise, and it must scare Eddie because she jumps, frantically pulling her head back again to look at Richie, and that’s about when Richie realizes she’s crying.

Eddie looks horrified. “Rich-”

“No, it’s-” Richie mumbles, letting go of Eddie’s shirt with one hand to swipe her own shirt sleeve under her eye. “Fuck, I’m sorry.” A tiny sob escapes her throat. “Shit. This is the least romantic thing I’ve ever done.”

“You say that like you’ve ever done anything romantic,” Eddie teases quietly. She makes sure to maintain eye contact with Richie, makes sure Richie can see she’s smiling a little, that it’s a joke. It only makes Richie sob, broken and high pitched in her attempt to hold it back. 

“I’m sorry,” she repeats thickly. “I just… fuck. Fuck. You have to know, right? You have to know.”

Eddie frowns. “What?”

“You don’t…” Richie shakes her head, grabs Eddie’s waist and holds on to her for dear life. “Eddie. Fuck. I’ve been in love with you, like, my whole fucking life. Don’t,” she says quickly, watching Eddie open and close her mouth rapidly. “I need to… that’s what It used against me. When I was in the Deadlights, I saw you dying. Not any of the other Losers. You. It knew I… even when I was a kid, It knew. It showed me you dying cause it knew I…” 

“Richie…”

Richie shakes her head. “When I saw you again in that fucking Chinese place I remembered everything,” she continues, barreling forward through her strained, wet breathing and gasping sobs. “How I used to pick on you the most like a stupid fucking little boy because I couldn’t handle the fact that I liked you so fucking much. And you hated it, but you put up with me more than anybody else, and it just made me like you more. And I’m the grossest, most annoying person on earth but you still want to be my friend for some fucking reason, and in high school when I realized I really like girls, and I realized I had a crush on you, but I couldn’t say anything because we lived in fucking Derry and Bowers would’ve killed me if he found out- and now you’re here, and I see you every day and it’s the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire fucking life, and I…” 

Eddie places her hands on both of Richie’s wet cheeks, forcing Richie to look at her. “Richie? Shut up.”

Richie lets out a quiet whimper, but nods.

For a moment Eddie’s quiet, holding Richie’s face in palms of her hands, just watching her carefully. “You’re such a fucking idiot sometimes,” she mutters fondly. Richie lets out a wet laugh. “I… I don’t think I realized it when I was a kid, and if I did I definitely forgot about it when I left, but I really fucking liked you. Let me _finish_ , nerd,” she insists, eyebrows skyrocketing when Richie’s mouth gapes open. “Of course I fucking liked you, idiot. Do you really think I’d let anyone else wave a dirty sock from a fucking sewer at me and still be friends with them? Dude, if any of the others pulled a stunt like that I would’ve punched them in the fucking face.”

“I know this, and I love it about you.”

Eddie snickers. Her eyes are wide as saucers, still flickering all over Richie’s face as she speaks, her rant picking up speed. “It was always you for me,” she rambles quietly. Richie has to strain to catch it all, her voice is so low and her words rushing like water from a busted dam. “Since, like, middle school. I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t have a revelation about it until I saw you again in Derry all grown up- and fucking hot, so fuck you by the way, because that was not fucking fair to me at all.” Richie giggles and leans her forehead against Eddie’s as Eddie takes a deep breath. 

“I always liked you so much, and I didn’t realize that it was more than I was supposed to and different from the way I liked the others until it was too late,” she admits in a whisper. “And you moved and my mom shipped me to New York for college for a fucking business degree I didn’t want, and it was too late, and then I forgot fucking everything. But then I saw you again and it’s like, my whole childhood came rushing back to me but the thing that stuck out more than anything, more than my awful fucking dead mom or my dad dying or even the shit with the fucking clown was you.” Richie stares. “It was always _you_ , dumbass.”

“Eddie-” 

Eddie swiftly cuts her off, rushing into another torrent of memories and emotions Richie has to scramble to follow. “And then you came out and I fucking _panicked_ , dude, because that- it’s so stupid, it was like that meant I could’ve had a chance with you and the fucking clown ruined it, and my mother ruined it, and I was so fucking miserable with this guy I didn’t like at all- It made me forget that I’m a _lesbian_ , Richie, like, that kind of fucked up revelation. You came out and I realized _why_ you were it, I remembered never getting crushes on the other Losers- except maybe Bev, but I know you did, too- or how I never dated in college either, I barely got married and that shit was a mother-arranged fucking nightmare so it doesn’t even count. Like, I’m the it takes imagining fictional male characters as girls for me to get crushes on them kind of gay, and I fucking forgot because I didn’t realize that what I felt for you was a fucking crush until it was, like, three decades later and I remembered you existed.” 

It’s quiet for a long moment. Eddie’s still holding Richie’s face. Richie’s still clinging to her shirt, eyes slipped shut while she just breathes, leaning on Eddie for support. 

Then Richie’s eyes flicker open very suddenly. “Did you just come out to me?”

Eddie’s eyes go wide again. Then they soften, and she laughs. “Shit. I guess.”

“We’re so fucking backwards,” Richie giggles.

“We’ve always been backwards.” Eddie’s smiling again, soft and small and Richie can’t help but lean further in, stopping just short of kissing her. Her eyes are wide and instead of the fear and worry Richie’s terribly, horribly used to seeing, there’s a bright sort of warmth in the way she looks at Richie, and it makes her love-struck heart throb. 

“Will you move in with me?” Richie blurts out.

Eddie blinks. “What?”

“Like, officially,” she clarifies. Her grip on Eddie tightens as she rambles. “I know it’s literally been… like, three months-”

“Two and a half.”

“Yeah, but- and I didn’t want to come off too strong, but that ship sailed a million fucking years ago, I guess, and…” She takes a deep breath. “I want you to move in with me. I want to share a bed with you, and steal your jackets and not have to pretend it’s cause mine are never clean, even if that’s also true, and I want to see you and your ridiculous, adorable bedhead first thing every morning, and I want to come home and kiss you and ask you about your boring ass job and make dinner together and watch Netflix on the couch until we get tired at like nine o’clock because we’re fucking old or whatever, and I want… I want you here. All the fucking time.” She’s not meeting Eddie’s eyes anymore, staring somewhere past her shoulder, and thinks she might be shaking a little again. “It’s honestly kind of annoying how much I… I _like_ you.”

“Well, it was sweet until you said that,” Eddie jokes with a tiny laugh.

“Sorry.”

“Shut up, Richie.” There’s a hand under Richie’s chin, tilting her head up so she’s forced to look Eddie in the eyes again. “I don’t know if you noticed, but we’ve kind of been roommates for two and a half months now.”

“I know, but I didn’t-”

“I know,” Eddie agrees softly. “Honestly, I think I just assumed. We can make it official if you want. Not exactly sure how, cause literally all of my stuff is here already.”

It takes all of Richie’s strength and willpower not to make a sex joke. “Fair.”

There’s a comfortable silence after that, in which Eddie leans her forehead against Richie’s and studies her face carefully. “Well?”

“What?”

Eddie rolls her eyes. “Are you gonna kiss me again, or do I have to do everything myself around here?”

Richie blinks, and then oh, she’s arrived. Her answer is a kiss.

-

Flying anywhere the day before Thanksgiving is literal hell, Eddie keeps telling her. It’s not like Richie has a lot of experience in that department- she hasn’t talked to her dad since she left home the first time, and her sister is off somewhere living her best doctor life, so she’s never actually traveled anywhere for any of the holidays. But they’re at LAX about to fly to Ben’s house in fucking South Dakota to have Thanksgiving with the Loser’s Club, and Richie really should’ve anticipated the hellish airport experience, really. 

“We’re never leaving the house during Christmas,” Eddie mutters under her breath as they dart through the crowd in a near sprint- or as close to a sprint as you can actually get in what feels somewhat like a fucking mosh pit surrounding every fucking gate- to their terminal. “I refuse. I fucking hate airports.”

“You hate most public places,” Richie reminds her when they reach a break in the crowd.

Eddie rolls her eyes. “Yeah, but airports are pretty fucking high up on the list. The only thing worse than airports is airplanes.”

That’s the word Richie’s brain harps on, and apparently Eddie can see it, because her lips purse together until they lose a little color, and she looks frantically to the linoleum floor as she fast walks. “But you flew to LA-”

“Shut up.”

“Aw, Eds, I feel so special-”

“Beep beep, Richie.” 

It’s an honest to god struggle to reach their gate, but they make it with ten minutes to spare, which prompts Eddie to spiel about how she knew it was a good idea to get there early, can they imagine what would’ve happened if she hadn’t rushed Richie all morning because god she packs like a fucking sloth. Richie just laughs, practically admiring the characteristic annoyed but pleased look on Eddie’s face as she lets go of her rolling suitcase. 

“You’re so cute when you’re pissed,” Richie says.

Eddie startles again, doing her very best to frown and keep looking pissed- and Richie really does think she’s still pissed, knowing Eddie, even if there’s more to it what with how flustered she looks now- despite the fond curl at the corners of her lips. “You’re such an asshole.”

“And you’re _cute, cute_ -”

“Shut up.”

When they finally board the plane, the first thing Eddie does is pull a travel sized pack of Clorox wipes from her backpack and wipe down her seat and little pull out table, a firm look on her face that dares Richie to mock her for it, which she doesn’t. She’s gotten sick after flying too many times to think of it- not that she thinks many of them were actually the stomach flu or traveler’s sickness and not just vertigo or generalized anxiety featuring a cool panic disorder, but she thinks it’s the sentiment that counts. 

Then Eddie pulls out a tiny medicine bottle and holds up out for Richie, looking a little sheepish. 

“What’s that?”

Eddie looks pointedly at the medicine, cheeks going faintly pink. “It’s, uh, Dramamine? I didn’t see any in your stuff and I, uh, get travel sick sometimes, and I know you do? You threw up a fucking concerning amount the last time we traveled together, and you should really see a doctor about it, but…” She takes a breath and looks up at Richie. “It’s supposed to help. You don’t have to, though, I don’t-”

“Thanks,” Richie whispers. Her heart’s doing that thing again where it clenches and relaxes in painful succession with something heavy like unconditional love and this overwhelming desire to marry the fuck out of Eddie Kaspbrak every time she does something domestic, like deep clean her- _their_ \- apartment the day after she moves in- and she did move in, Richie thinks belatedly- or straight up give her the jackets she knows Richie’s going to steal anyway, or buy her motion sickness medication before they fly to South Dakota to celebrate Thanksgiving with their friends from middle school because she knows Richie gets sick easily.

Eddie makes the frustrated but pleased face again, and hands Richie the bottle. 

The package says to take two with water, so Richie settles down into her seat, puts her phone on airplane mode, and grabs her bag to rummage for her water bottle. She doesn’t remember passing out, but when she comes to again it’s to Eddie’s head on her shoulder, her elbow nudging Richie’s ribs.

“We’re here.”

“You didn’t tell me that Dramamine would knock me the fuck out.”

Eddie makes a minorly distressed face. “I mean, it’s on the package, one of the major side effects is drowsiness-”

“No, that’s amazing,” Richie amends with a yawn. “Fuck. I’m taking that every time I fly for the rest of my life.”

“You’re such an idiot,” Eddie says fondly. 

When they get off the plane and head to the luggage claim, there’s already a cluster of a few familiar faces waiting there and waving their direction. One curly haired bastard is holding a small sign that reads “ _EDDIE KASPBRAK AND THE STUPID ONE_ ” that makes Richie throw her head back and shout a laugh at the ceiling. Eddie looks straight up pleased, no frustration muddling the shit eating grin on her face.

“Good to see you, too, Stan,” Eddie greets him with a hug. “Hey, guys.”

Stan gives Richie a look, and she just shrugs.

“You’re right, but I don’t think you had to say it.”

“Oh, no, I did have to say it.”

Richie glances around briefly with a snort. “God, I wish the pap followed me around here like they do at LAX, I really want documentation of this exact moment.”

“I’m way ahead of you,” Bev cuts in, holding up her phone. Richie slings an arm around a faux annoyed-looking Stanley’s shoulders and grins, giving Beverly a thumbs up as she takes a few pictures. “Stan, you got a twitter?”

“No.”

“Lucky,” Eddie mumbles. “It’s hell.” Ben snorts and nods in agreement.

“It’s hilarious!” Richie insists.

“You only say that because for some fucked up reason you like it when people roast you,” Eddie teases. 

Stan gives Richie another meaningful look, but Richie just smirks and shrugs. He’s gonna give her hell for this later, and she fucking knows it. For now she just grabs her luggage and lets Ben lead the way out of the airport. 

It’s not that they hadn’t talked about telling the Losers. Richie’s felt pretty nonchalant about it, but Eddie’s nervous- which is fair, she thinks. Telling the Losers they’re dating, for Eddie, means coming out to the Losers, and despite knowing they’ll react well, that shit is terrifying. So Richie has made it as clear as she possibly can that they don’t have to tell them anything, not yet, not until Eddie’s sure she’s ready. 

When they arrive at Ben’s house, the others are waiting at the door, barreling them down in the foyer with hugs and pleasantries. Richie is briefly smothered in a hug by Bill, then seconds later shaking hands with his wife, a sweet blonde named Audra she swears she’s seen before- Bill’s movies, of course, well that makes sense. They all congregate in the living room, Richie sitting sock footed and cross legged in the middle of a couch with Eddie’s legs in her lap from her perch in the corner.

This time, Eddie opens her mouth. “Hey, guys?”

“Yeah?” Bill asks.

“I want to tell you something.”

Richie’s heart stops. She’s not even the one coming out, not really, why the fuck is she panicking? She knows the Losers won’t be shocked. She knows Stanley Uris has been waiting for this exact fucking moment since he was maybe ten years old. 

Eddie takes a deep breath. “Uh, first, I’m gay.” She pauses and crosses her ankles in Richie’s lap. “Second, Richie and I are dating.”

It’s quiet for a split second before Stanley locks eyes with Richie and says, “About fucking time, you two.”

Eddie laughs. The entire room bursts into a mix of delirious giggles and full bellied laughter. Richie leans over and wraps both arms around Eddie’s middle, squeezes her tight and whispers in her ear, “I’m proud of you, Eds.”

“Seriously, you’ve been pining after each other since the third grade,” Stan continues. Richie looks at him- he’s grinning, he’s not slick, but his voice is carefully mock annoyed. “Neither of you are subtle. You’re about as subtle as a forest fire, the two of you combined.” 

“Thanks, Stan,” Richie says sincerely through a laugh. 

“I’m not done, I have decades of- receipts, Bev?- on you two.”

“It’s receipts, yes.”

“Let them have their moment,” Patty giggles at him, pushing his chest lightly. 

Conversation flows as normal after that, and Richie may not be used to being able to hold Eddie’s hand around other people, or stare at her while she talks with wide, fond eyes and not worry about getting caught, but with the Losers it’s so easy to get accustomed in minutes. It’s not like they aren’t used to it already, if she thinks about it. She does catch Stan’s gaze a few times, but each time he’s either rolling his eyes or genuinely smiling at them, and both instances make her heart swell.

Later that night, Eddie dumps both of their suitcases in her room, head ducked to not very subtly hide her red face and persistent little smile. Richie follows her to the open doorway, but she can hear a conversation down the hall, so she zones out a little where she stands.

“I don’t know if I’m ready yet, but… I want to go back.” 

“Stan-”

“Listen, I know, it’s fucking stupid. I’m not going anywhere near Maine anytime soon, trust me.” There’s a pause. Eddie catches her faraway look and frowns, but Richie just nods her head down the hall. “I want to do it one last time, and then never go back to Derry or think about Derry ever again, okay?”

Richie inches down the hall with Eddie close behind her, and they end up hovering outside Stan and Patty’s room, looking worriedly at each other.

“I can hear you out there,” Stan says. 

Richie’s shoulders hunch sheepishly as she shuffles through the half open door with Eddie, finding Stan sat on the edge of the bed next to Bill, who looks vaguely horrified. “Stan-”

“Good to know you guys know my name,” Stan mutters, voice flat. 

Bill folds his arms. “We’re just worried, man. You hate Derry. You n… never wanted to go back.”

“I get it,” Eddie whispers. Richie stares at her openly. She nods at Stan. “No, I really do. It’s like… for me, going back felt like ripping off a bandaid, even if I didn’t realize that until later. All the memories came back, the… the fear came back. The truth is, none of us wanted to go back.” She looks at Bill briefly, shrugging, then back to Stan. “But, at least for me, it felt like… like I needed to.”

Stan swallows hard, then nods. “I need to know it’s real,” he says slowly. He glances at Richie. “You said the house on Neibolt is gone?”

“Yeah,” Richie answers thickly.

“I need to see it.” Stan nods sharply a few times. “All I can remember is that fucking house. What it looked like inside that house, or down the well, or in the sewers. What it felt like to be there.” He pauses, lips pursing into a tight line, then rushes to finish his thought before any of them can interrupt. “Getting lost in that house, thinking you left me in the sewers. I want to remember the town we grew up in without that feeling. I need to know for sure that it’s over.” 

“So when are we going?” Richie jumps, and swings around to see Bev leaning on the doorframe, Ben and Mike hovering in the hall behind her.

Stan makes a wary face. “We?”

“Of course, we, Stanley,” Bill says. 

“I’m not going to make you guys go back to that shithole town just because I’m going.”

Richie shrugs. “Good thing you’re not making us,” she says. Stan locks eyes with her, and she smiles a little. “Hey, none of us had to go back alone. What the fuck makes you think we’d let you?”

Stan looks to Eddie, as if for help, but she just shakes her head, stepping forward to grasp Stan’s shoulder and squeeze it. He smiles, if only a tiny, sad one.

“Losers stick together.”

-

Christmas, Richie thinks, is only moderately less stressful.

Eddie had delegated Richie to mashed potatoes and stuffing duty, the two things even she couldn’t fuck up- too terribly- while she set to cooking a whole fucking chicken and some kind of casserole she made at Thanksgiving that Richie near demanded she make again, saying it was all she wanted for Christmas, really. The Losers had called intermittently throughout Christmas Eve, including Stanley, which made Richie laugh only for Stanley to hang up on her and just call Eddie instead- which Richie, of course, barged in on. They’d cleaned off Richie’s old ass Blu-ray player and watched The Grinch, every weird claymation Christmas movie from the 90’s, It’s A Wonderful Life, and are halfway through White Christmas when Eddie checks the time and unlocks her phone, then gets up from the couch.

“Be right back,” she says.

“Where you going?” Richie asks through a mouthful of popcorn.

Eddie rolls her eyes. “I’m calling my uncle real quick,” she answers, already on her way to the kitchen. “And checking on the casserole.”

“Alright,” Richie calls after her, then falls silent. 

Distantly, Richie thinks she did know that Eddie did have extended family left, and should’ve at least entertained the possibility that she kept in touch with them. Can’t relate, Richie thinks. She hasn’t spoken a single word to Wentworth Tozier since she left home in 1994. And she’s fine this way, she insists, it doesn’t matter. So what if she’s a stereotypical gay who has a terrible relationship with her father? It’s fine.

But she can hear Eddie chattering lightly with her uncle in the other room, and it sends a foreign spike of pain through her chest and up her spine. It’s the kind of foreign that actually just used to be a dull ache, but has grown sharper with the years, and much like fighting a murder clown from space in the sewers of Derry, Maine was the straw that broke her back then, this seems to be her tipping point now. 

Richie glues her eyes to the TV, focusing on how fucking pretty Rosemary Clooney is in that slim black dress and her pretty blonde curls- she’s always thought so, and really, with every passing year she discovers a new clue from her lifespan that really should’ve hinted at the fact that she’s pretty fucking gay a _long_ time ago- and does not think about the fact that she hasn’t spent a single Christmas with her family since she was seventeen years old. It doesn’t work, because of course it doesn’t work, but Richie thinks it’s the thought that counts.

Then Eddie returns, and she knows that the jig is up. “Rich?”

“Hmm?”

There’s a dip in the couch next to her, a gentle hand on her arm. “You’re crying.”

 _Oh_. Richie doesn’t trust her voice, so she just shrugs. 

“Richie,” Eddie mumbles, but Richie shakes her head. Thankfully she doesn’t push, just wraps her arms around Richie and lean her head on Richie’s shoulder. Richie breathes. 

“Remember when you said that I didn’t have to bottle up what I was going through?”

Richie swallows. “Yeah?”

“And that you’re here for me no matter what?”

“... Yeah.”

Eddie lifts her head and gives Richie a serious look. “You know the same is true for me, right? That you don’t have to bottle up your feelings either?”

“It’s my favorite pastime,” Richie attempts to joke. 

Eddie sighs, and lifts a hand to cup Richie’s jaw, thumb stroking lightly over her cheek. “Listen, I _know_ you know that’s not healthy. Baby, it’s Christmas and you’re crying-”

Weirdly, that’s what does it for her. Richie squeezes her eyes shut and gasps, violently shaking her head.

“What?”

“You called me baby,” Richie whispers in a rush.

“... And?”

She feels like she’s melting, like she’s soaking into the couch, a wet puddle of tears never to be seen again. She sniffs and keeps shaking. “Fuck, dude, no one’s ever called me _baby_ ,” she mumbles, broken. 

“Richie…” 

Richie shakes her head again. “Or, like, any fucking pet name? Or any endearment? I’ve never had anyone be this sweet with me, I’ve never… spent Christmas with somebody I love.” She takes a deep, gasping breath. “Not since I was like, a senior in high school and my mom was alive.”

This time, Eddie doesn’t say anything, and Richie almost worries until Eddie straight up pulls Richie half into her lap, arms coiling tightly around her middle while Richie shakes and blinks away tears that burn and slip free anyway. Richie falls into it easily, ducks her head to hide her face in Eddie’s neck, stifles several loud breaths that might be sobs. 

“Fuck, dude, I’ve _got_ to stop crying on you.”

“Shut up, Richie,” Eddie murmurs, a small laugh slipping with it. She cards her fingers through Richie’s hair, just holds her, and Richie clings. “You know you’re allowed to be upset about that, right? Like, that’s a perfectly fucking reasonable thing to be upset about.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to like it,” Richie mumbles wetly. 

Eddie shrugs her free shoulder. “Yeah, well, I don’t think sadness is supposed to be fun, really.”

“You see? That’s exactly why I avoid it.”

She can hear the roll of Eddie’s eyes in her tone underneath the vague distress, the kind of worried tone she usually reserves for CDC statistics or when Richie forgets to do the laundry- or of course, when Richie’s being a dumbass. “You don’t avoid it,” she corrects. “You just bottle it up until it all comes out at once, and it hurts even worse cause then it’s not just the one thing you’re upset about.” Eddie sighs, tucking a grown out bang- she needs a haircut, Richie thinks- behind Richie’s ear. “It’s all the things you didn’t let yourself be upset about. Richie, I’ve seen you cry maybe three times in my whole life.”

“Four,” Richie says.

“Hmm?” 

“When my high school boyfriend broke up with me the month before senior prom.” That makes Eddie laugh. Richie smiles. “I didn’t even fucking like him.”

“That’s still upsetting. Dude, you’re allowed to have feelings, you know that, right?”

Richie doesn’t answer. 

They fall quiet for a bit after that, Eddie just cradling Richie in her lap, Richie clinging for dear life, as she most often is, especially nowadays. White Christmas plays softly from the TV, the resounding chorus of the finale filling the room.

“You should call your dad,” Eddie says. 

Richie freezes. 

“If you want to,” Eddie adds quickly. “I don’t know how you left things off, but…” Richie doesn’t move. “Was that too much? I’m sorry, I don’t want to overstep, I just…” 

“It’s fine,” Richie whispers. In reality she feels the absolute furthest thing from fine, but like most feelings, she’s ready to repress the fuck out of it. Something like guilt and hatred and embarrassment and abandonment bubbles up in her stomach. She swallows it back down. 

“... Maybe your sister?”

“I texted her this morning,” Richie croaks. She and her husband are in Texas with their two kids, probably at the Christmas Eve service hosted by the local megachurch they attend every other Sunday. She’s quiet for a long, terrible moment before she adds, “I think I still have his number.”

“... Yeah?”

“I don’t know if it’s still his number,” she rambles on. “It’s been twenty two fucking years, he doesn’t even live in the same house- he got remarried, dude, his whole life is…” _different_ , she doesn’t say. _Without me. Not for me_.

When she glances up from her hiding spot in Eddie’s neck, Eddie’s pursing her lips thoughtfully. She looks cautious. “If you want,” she says slowly, “you could always try.”

Richie huffs. “I fucking hate phone calls.”

“If you want,” Eddie repeats. “You don’t have to.”

Richie doesn’t want to. “Okay,” she says, and fishes her phone out of her pocket. Her heart is thundering loudly in her chest, the sound echoing in her ears painfully. “Never got around to deleting it,” she mumbles as she scrolls through her contacts. “Whole contact book always just transfers over when I get a new phone, you know?”

“... Rich, you left home before that was a thing.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Richie jokes a little too forcefully, her thumb hovering over Wentworth Tozier’s number.

Eddie squeezes her arm. “Do you want me to go-”

“No,” Richie snaps. Her gaze snaps up and meets Eddie’s, wide eyed and worried. “No, I… I _need_ …”

“Okay,” Eddie assures her, giving her arm another squeeze. Richie worms her arm out of Eddie’s grip and grabs her hand in hers, interlocking their fingers and holding on. “I’m here, baby.”

Richie could fucking cry. Instead, she presses ‘call Wentworth Tozier.’

Surprisingly, it rings. Once. Twice. Three times. Richie’s heart is pounding. She can’t breathe. She stares resolutely at the coffee table in a dead panic and just listens.

“Hello?” It’s a woman’s voice. Soft, older, kind. Unfamiliar.

Richie clears her through. “Uh, hi, uh… is… is this still Wentworth Tozier’s… number?”

“Yes,” the woman answers. “This is Claudia speaking.”

 _Claudia_. Her step mom? They’ve never met. They may never meet. “Uh, hi, I’m… uh… I’m Rich- I’m Rachel? Tozier?”

There’s a pause. “You’re Went’s daughter,” Claudia says slowly. It isn’t unkind, but it is cautious. Richie thinks that’s fair. 

“Yeah,” she stammers. “Sorry, I… I was wondering… if I could… uh, if I… if he’s not busy, or…”

“I’ll get him for you,” she says. 

Richie nods, then quickly says, “thank you.”

There’s silence for a minute. Richie still thinks she may very well throw up. She squeezes Eddie’s hand tighter, feels Eddie squeeze back, and takes a deep, shaky breath in and out. 

“Hello?”

Richie panics. She says nothing, just holds the phone slightly away from her face so it doesn’t pick up her heavy breathing and make her sound like a serial killer on the phone with her fucking dad. Eddie squeezes again. “Hi. Uh, hi. It’s. Uh. It’s… Rachel?”

A pause. Richie’s a little afraid she’s going to cut off the circulation in Eddie’s arm what with how tightly she’s clinging now. 

“Hi, Richie.” 

And despite everything, he doesn’t sound… angry. It’s a soft response, a gentle one that makes Richie tear up. 

Richie lets out a wet laugh. “Uh. Hey. How’s… hi. How are you?”

Wentworth Tozier laughs. “I’m doing pretty well, kiddo.” He pauses. “My daughter just called me.”

She wants to say shut up, but forcibly chokes it down. “I wanted to say hi,” she croaks. “Uh. And Merry Christmas, you know? Cause it’s, uh… I know it’s been a million years, or like, twenty two?” She swallows hard, takes another deep breath. “I’m sorry I never called.”

He’s quiet for a moment. “I understand,” he says. “It was… it was a very difficult time for all of us.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t make it okay for me to, like, walk out on my family or some shit,” she rambles on, mumbling brokenly to herself now. “And then I just kept never calling because I felt so guilty about it, and then I just felt guiltier about not calling, and I didn’t- I didn’t even think that this number would work, it’s been so long and I-”

“Richie,” her dad interrupts. Richie’s mouth snaps shut. “I know that… when your mother died,” and there she goes, blubbering into the back of her hand while Eddie holds her still, “things were… rough at home. I’ve never held that against you.” He falls silent for a minute. “If anything, I felt terrible for the way we left things.”

“No, no, it’s not-”

“It’s not okay,” he says. “The way I reacted to you… to my daughter, for who she is… was unacceptable. I’ve had twenty two years to mull that over. I’ve felt guilty, too, Rach.”

“It was, like, the nineties,” Richie mumbles. “Man, _I_ reacted badly to me. Like, it sucked, but I get it.”

A pause. “How have you been, Rich?”

Richie purses her lips together tightly. “You remember Eddie Kaspbrak?”

“Your little asthmatic friend from grade school?”

Richie rolls her eyes. Eddie stifles a laugh into her free hand. “Yeah, that’s the one. Uh. We live together now. Our whole friend group met up in Derry over the summer to…” _fight a murder clown from space and we almost died and I’m forever traumatized by the vision I had of her dying_ \- “catch up.” She pauses, glancing at Eddie with wide, teary eyes. Eddie smiles and nods. “Uh, we’re also. We’re, um. She’s my girlfriend. We’re dating.”

Silence. Then, “I’m really happy for you.” Richie leans her forehead on hers and Eddie’s interlocked hands and stifles another sob. “I know you really liked her when you were kids-”

“How does everyone know that!” Richie exclaims, voice several octaves too high. Went laughs, and she can’t help but join in. “Seriously, that’s the only reaction we’ve heard from anyone who knows us.”

“You were never very good at hiding your feelings,” Went chuckles. “I know you thought you were, but sweetheart, you’re an open book.”

Eddie starts giggling hysterically into the nearest pillow. “Yeah, laugh it up. Oh, Eddie heard that, and she agrees with you.”

A pause. “Oh, tell her I say hello, will you?”

Eddie snickers. “Hi, Mr. Tozier.”

“She says hi.”

There’s another pause, and a brief, muffled conversation. “We’re leaving for church soon,” Went tells her, a little gruff and sad this time. “But it was really wonderful to hear from you.”

Richie smiles. “You too, dad. I’ll call you sooner this time.” 

Went laughs. “I look forward to that.” He sighs, murmurs something else away from the phone, then says, “I love you, Rach.” 

Richie squeezes her eyes shut, letting the collected tears leak as she breathes shakily. “I love you, too, dad.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.” And she hangs up.

Richie drops her phone into her lap. She’s frozen for a moment, but the moment passes, and she collapses into herself and sobs. Eddie’s on her in an instant, hugging her middle and whispering soft encouragements into her hair, and Richie just keeps sobbing.

“Why the fuck am I crying?” she demands between choked breaths. “What the _fuck_? I’m happy, why am I still crying?”

“Cause that was a lot,” Eddie murmurs gently. Richie shakes. “You did so good, baby, that was a really fucking scary thing to do and I’m proud of you.”

Well, that just makes her cry harder. 

For a while Eddie holds her, and Richie clings and cries and cries until her eyes run dry, and she thinks it might be the first time that’s ever happened. It hurts, it fucking _burns_ the amount she’s cried, her throat stings, but god, the physical weight off her shoulders is enough. 

“I love you,” Richie mumbles. Her voice is shot to hell, cracking everywhere, and she doesn’t care. “Fuck, I love you so much.” She looks up at Eddie, who’s looking at her with that exasperated fondness she knows so well, and lifts her hands from Eddie’s sweater to cup her face in both hands, holding her cheeks gingerly. “Eds. You mean everything to me. You’re everything.”

“Baby,” Eddie murmurs, and this time Richie doesn’t hurt. Her heart swells, but it doesn’t feel like dying. “Merry Christmas.”

-

She comes out in a tweet. 

_Richie Tozier @trashmouthtozier_

_today i went to starbucks and i meant to order a peppermint mocha latte but my mouth said pumpkin spice instead? and i still don’t know if that was an I’m Tired thing or an ADHD thing? anyway this is a coming out tweet i’m bisexual_

Kayla texts her about thirteen thumbs up afterward- she immediately closed Twitter out of pure fear, even almost puts her phone on airplane mode, but Kayla’s hyping her up.

_From: Kaylanne_

_I’m proud of you, you know that? You did a really scary thing._

_I promise the reaction isn’t what you’re afraid it is._

_Good luck!_

Fifteen minutes later, her name is being called by Seth Fucking Meyers, and a studio audience applauds as a musical lick plays to accompany her entrance onto the late show. She sits and waves a little awkwardly at them, turning to Seth Fucking Meyers with a faux nonchalant grin.

“It’s good to have you back!” Seth says kindly.

“Hey, it’s good to be back. Good to see you.”

Seth leans back into his seat. “So, it’s only been- what, a couple months? SInce your last tour.”

“Yeah, like, half a year,” Richie says with a nod. 

“What made you want to go back on the road again so soon?”

At that, Richie shrugs and gives him a shit eating smirk. “I mean, money, right?” That earns her a around of chuckles from the audience, and a pleased snicker from Seth, but she continues. “No, I didn’t actually really finish my last tour, cause a lot of personal… I don’t remember if I can curse, so I’m gonna say crap- came up, but… I wanted to make it up to the people I kinda left hanging, and I also got, like, brand new management. I even got a brand new writer.”

“Oh!”

“Yeah, it’s me.” 

The audience laughs. “You didn’t used to write your material?”

“No, these two dude bros wrote it, and it shows,” she snorts. “It was so bad. But, like, nobody I showed my jokes to thought they were funny, so I dropped it, but after that tour I was like, this is… terrible and I’m miserable, and I decided I wasn’t gonna do that anymore.”

Seth holds up a card with a picture of Richie from her last stand-up special for the audience. “So your claim to fame was written by dude bros-”

“Yes.”

“But you got a lot of attention from that, yeah?”

“Yeah, but not a lot of good attention,” Richie corrects. “It was all demeaning bullshit- sorry- about women and, like, cheap shots at failed relationships or whatever.”

“Your upcoming tour, Trash The Trashmouth, it starts this Saturday in Los Angeles- what can people expect?”

Richie purses her lips consideringly. She has a prepared answer, a safe one, a general sweeping statement about becoming more personal with her art or whatever. She looks at Seth and opens her mouth.

“I mean, it’s overall a lot more personal to my actual life this time. I make a lot more gay jokes at my own expense in this one,” she blurts out with a dopey smile, shaky fingers fidgeting with her jacket zipper. “This isn’t what I was gonna say, just so you know, I had some prepared answer but I actually just came out as bisexual in a… fricking tweet, like, ten minutes ago.”

Seth’s face breaks into a massive, seemingly genuine grin, and the crowd applauds and cheers, to which Richie shakes her head, still smiling like a fucking idiot. “Yeah! I wasn’t gonna say anything first- did you plan that?”

“No!” Richie exclaims, throwing her shaking hands into the air with a stunned laugh. “No, no, my manager texted me backstage like- oh, I’m proud of you, whatever- have fun on your late night interview now, Richie! I don’t know! I just… wanted to say it, the cat was suffocating in that bag that I stuffed in the closet, like, a hundred years ago, I thought I… might as well.” 

“That’s really awesome, I’m happy for you,” Seth says. 

“Thank you!”

“Can I ask you an annoying question?”

“I’d be very disappointed if you didn’t.”

Seth laughs with the audience. “Is there a special someone? It’s a very bad question, I know.”

“No!” Richie laughs. “It’s terrible, I love it. There’s…” 

She pauses consideringly. She’s not about to namedrop and subsequently out Eddie on live television.

“I recently got back in touch with this girl I’ve been, like, in love with since, like, the fourth grade?” Richie confides in a low, nervous giggle. “We’ve been best friends since the dawn of time. I don’t know, it’s… it’s just nice? We live together now, and she’s like… hyper aware of cleanliness and super sanitary and I’m, like, a human tornado?” The audience howls. Richie nods in agreement. “She puts up with my bad jokes- I tell her my jokes, and if she laughs at them, they’re good. She’s probably watching this.” She giggles again, covering her mouth as the audience laughs and awws. “She’s definitely watching this. No, it’s so fucking nice. I’m really happy, man.”

“That’s awesome,” Seth replies, grinning still. “Does she know?”

“I mean…” 

“Oh!”

“She knows!” Richie clarifies fast, shaking her head with another manic giggle. “No, no, she knows! It’s just- dude, I’m so emotionally constipated all the time, I don’t talk about my feelings at all, she’s gonna watch this and go, ‘the fuck is wrong with you?’” The audience laughs, and Richie’s hyperactive nerves start to settle very gradually. “‘Oh, so you’ll tell Seth Meyers about your feelings, but not me? That’s so unhealthy,’ and then go on a rant about communication and tell me to go see a therapist.”

“Do you have a therapist?”

“I have two therapists, actually,” Richie answers, and the audience chuckles.

“Oh, wow!”

“And they both deserve a Nobel Prize.” Richie laughs at herself. “No, man, it’s been really great.”

“I’m so glad to hear that.”

The rest of the interview goes off without a hitch. Richie does a few Voices, publicly mocks Bill Denbrough without a hint of malice, gets Seth to help her start a Twitter hashtag to get her in his next movie, and promotes the fuck out of her show- hopefully successfully. 

When the cameras cut to a commercial, Seth shakes her hand again and they exchange pleasantries, and after a short conversation she’s being whisked back to her dressing room to pack up. The first thing she does upon entering is fish her phone out of her back pocket and scroll for a minute- the Losers chat has blown up in her absence. 

_LOSERS CLUB_

_From: Bev_

_[Attachment: Image]_

_A FUCKING TWEET RICHIE_

_From: Staniel the Maniel_

_how could you possibly be surprised by this. how_

_From: Bev_

_okay for the record that wasn’t surprise that was loud support_

_From: Billiam_

_proud of u rich!_

_From: Eddie Spaghetti_

_richie, you’re such a moron._

_congrats_

_From: Micycle_

_what did richie do?_

_OH_

_From: Bev_

_YEAH_

_From: Micycle_

_congrats man!_

_From: Bev_

_ben says congrats he’s makin popcorn_

_RICHIE DID YOU PLAN THIS_

_From: Staniel the Maniel_

_$10 says she didn’t_

_of course i was right_

_From: Eddie Spaghetti_

_never doubt your intuition_

_From: Staniel the Maniel_

_it’s not intuition i just know she’s an impulsive moron_

_From: Eddie Spaghetti_

_you’re right, and you should say it._

_From: Billiam_

_is she talking about you eds_

_From: Eddie Spaghetti_

_i swear to GOD, richard._

_From: Bev_

_awwww she didn’t even namedrop, what a shame_

_twitter would eat you up_

_From: Eddie Spaghetti_

_I know_

_I’d rather die_

_From: Bev_

_fair_

_From: Buff Ben_

_guys this is so fucking cute who knew trashmouth had it in her_

_From: Billiam_

_oh no we all knew she’s a big ass softie right_

_right?_

_From: Micycle_

_oh definitely_

_From: Bev_

_yeah ofc_

_From: Eddie Spaghetti_

_can confirm, soft ass bitch_

_From: Staniel the Maniel_

_the softest little bastard i’ve ever met_

_don’t let her fool you for a second_

_From: Buff Ben_

_okay, fair_

_To: LOSERS CLUB_

_i hate you all_

_From: Bev_

_EDDIE GET YOUR GIIIIIIIIIIIIRL_

Richie throws her head back and laughs, but before she can type a response, or even think to do so, there’s an incoming Facetime call.

“Hey, baby!”

“You’re such a fucking idiot,” Eddie laughs at her. She’s fucking beaming. “Hey. I’m proud of you.”

“Uh, thanks. That was the most nerve wrecking fifteen minutes of my entire life. I think I’m vibrating out of my fucking skin from stress or something.”

Eddie rolls her eyes. “You did great. Sappy bastard.”

“I couldn’t help it!” Richie exclaims. She softens, tilting her head and smiling fondly at the kind of glitchy image of Eddie in front of her. “Oh, you love it.”

“Debatable. Highly debatable.”

“No, you do.”

Eddie’s still grinning when she throws up her free hand and says, “I plead the fucking fifth, dude.”

-

“I love my parents, they’re alright. They weren’t always alright, sure, but like, they could’ve been way worse. The worst thing my dad did when I came out- sorry, was outed, by my own parents- as bisexual, he said, “not in my house.””

Richie glances around the stage for a moment, feigning confusion. “No? So if I just go outside, is that cool?” That earns a laugh, and Richie can’t help but smile with it. “Is this just an outdoors thing? Can I be bisexual in the backyard? Do I need to be off property, like is the street okay, maybe the sidewalk? Just not indoors, alright, got it. Indoors is straights-only, I’ll just take my gay outside. Wait, can I be half outside half inside? You know, if I’m bi? No, that might let bugs in, I’ll just pitch a tent across the street with the pansexuals who also don’t know where the fuck they’re allowed to exist.” 

The audience laughs, genuinely laughs. Richie cannot stop fucking grinning. It’s still weird and nerve wrecking to make jokes like this, but she’s back in Los Angeles with a fairly liberal crowd, and they’re eating this shit up. Frankly, Richie’s never felt more alive. 

“Not in my house-” it wasn’t after he said that, but at one point that same year I literally walked out of an argument with my parents… like, walked out of the house… and across town to my friend’s house.” She snorts at herself. “Just fucking walked- it was like, December, middle of a Sunday, and I lived in fucking _Maine_ so you _know_ it was negative a hundred degrees outside- and I just left. You said not in your house! You said nothing about other people’s indoor spaces!”

With that, the audience howls. Richie can’t help but giggle with them, holding the mic away from her face so it’s not too obnoxious.

She glances offstage then, and there’s Eddie with her arms folded and jaw set comically tight to badly mask the way she’s still fucking losing her shit over Richie’s dumb jokes. She can see Eddie’s shoulders shaking with it, and it makes Richie’s heart swell with affection. 

“No, things are much better now, family speaking. My dad and I saw Bohemian Rhapsody _and_ Rocketman together so we’re, like, totally chill.”

The audience chuckles. Eddie looks like she’s going to chop her head off, which is fair, Richie thinks. 

“I spent a lot of years dwelling on my sexuality,” Richie says, starting to pace. “Many of which I spent in therapy, and we’d dissect my All You Can Eat Buffet of traumas I’d collected over my relatively shorter lifespan. And for a long time, I was at a place where I couldn’t tell if certain behaviors were learned out of, like, pure survival instinct, or were actually me, which is a _fucking bummer_ thing to say out loud, yeah?” That gets a couple of snickers and a chorus of short laughs. “Just so we’re clear, you can laugh at all of this. I wouldn’t be doing this bit if I didn’t want you to laugh at it, cause believe me, I also laugh at it. It’s fine now!” She shakes her head, still pacing, then grins into the mic and adds, “You can laugh at my gay crisis.” 

Out of the corner of her eye, Richie can see Eddie smack a hand over her mouth to catch the laugh that bubbles out, and she busts up giggling.

“I have this girlfriend,” Richie starts. Eddie immediately rolls her eyes. “She’s fucking wonderful, she also laughs at my gay crisis, it’s great! No, really, she’s amazing. I’m, like, annoyingly in love with her. Sorry, guys, this entire tour was a big excuse to tell the world how much I love my girlfriend, and there are no fucking refunds.

“I have many favorite things about my girlfriend- namely, _everything_ about my girlfriend- but I think my absolute favorite thing is that she does not put up with my shit.” Richie makes a mock stunned face, but it’s quickly marred by the grin she can’t help every time she talks about Eddie. “Oh, she will call me out with pleasure. I can’t get a single thing past her. I’ll be complaining about how I’m too tired to get anything done, or write, or do my laundry for the third week in a row, and she’ll just start listing things off- “ _Have you eaten? Have you drank any water today? I know you didn’t get enough sleep last night. Have you taken your meds? Do you know what a fucking shower is, Richie?_ ” It’s like, I don’t need a self care routine, I have a girlfriend who doesn’t put up with my bullshit.”

Richie starts pacing again, snickering to herself. “I really don’t know why she likes me so much. She’s a risk analyst, and I am the human embodiment of a risk.” 

Another chorus of laughs. Eddie’s shaking her head at her, but she’s still beaming. 

“Analyze this, baby! I have two therapists and out of control hyperactive ADHD, _and_ I’m a disaster bisexual! I know they say opposites attract, but…!” She cuts herself off giggling and shaking her head. “No, I fucking love my girlfriend. To all the little gays out there, I know way too many privileged white gays have said this already, but it gets better. It gets so much better.”

She’s still not used to the applause that gets her. It makes her cheeks hot and her heart pound and her palms sweat with something in between gratitude and disbelief just to say it, but the applause? It feels like she’s rocketing off the stage right into fucking space from the force of it every time.

To the side, Eddie is in the wings, clapping with them.

-

It’s the middle of June when Stanley brings it up on their weekly Facetime call.

“I think I’m ready to go back,” he tells Richie bluntly.

For a split second Richie’s confused. But her brain clicks online eventually, and her eyes blow comically wide. “Oh. Oh. Okay, yeah. You sure?”

Stan rolls his eyes. “Yeah. I’ve been thinking about it. I’m doing really well, Rich, I think it’s time.”

“So you’re sure.”

“Yes, Richie.”

Richie frowns playfully at her phone. “Sorry I'm concerned for my best friend, I’ll go fuck myself.”

“Don’t be a dick.”

“It’s a predisposition!”

“Richie, stop harassing Stan!” she hears Eddie call from the guest bedroom. Richie faceplants the couch in a full fucking pout. There’s footsteps, silence, and a sigh. “You’re so fucking dramatic. When were you thinking of going?”

“Probably sometime at the end of the month,” Stan replies. Richie lifts her head and looks at her phone where it’s propped up on the arm of the couch. “I have… three vacation days to burn right now. I just want to rip the bandaid off and be done.”

“Fair,” Eddie says.

“I’ll start looking at flights, what days were you thinking?”

Stan’s quiet for a moment, but Richie waits. She knows he feels bad, like he’s dragging them along- which is such fucking bullshit, but she’s not going to say that. “Uh, probably the 26th through the 28th? I was going to book a hotel room in Bangor, cause fuck that, you know?”

“Totally,” Richie agrees. “We could even kill a day in the city if you want. Losers Club’s Day Off.” 

She half expects Stan to retort, but he just nods and says, “Sure.”

Eddie sits next to her. “It’ll be good to see you guys,” she says genuinely, and Richie nods. “Like old times, you know? But less shitty.”

“Less murder-y, you know?”

“Beep beep, Richie,” Stan says with a small, choked laugh she knows he attempted to hold back, and she smiles. There he is.

“Hey, I’m just saying.” 

“That doesn’t mean you should.”

Richie makes a zippering motion over her lips, and throws the imaginary key at Eddie, who rolls her eyes and pretends to eat it. 

“You guys are gross.”

“Love you, too, Staniel!” Richie coos. Stan immediately hangs up, and she falls forward onto her phone laughing. 

Eddie rolls her eyes, but she’s grinning, too. “Look up flights,” she says as she stands, already heading back into the spare bedroom- that is now less of a spare bedroom and more Eddie’s at home office. They went to fucking Ikea for a desk and file cabinets and everything. “I have to finish this report, and then I’ll start dinner.”

“No, no, no, Edward Spaghedward,” Richie interrupts, sitting up cross legged on the couch, then resting her elbows on her knees so she can prop her chin in her hands. “No can do.”

Eddie’s brows furrow. “What?”

“We’re going out to eat, baby!”

“Why? We’re not getting Wendy’s again, that was one time because we were both too sick to cook, I told you it wouldn’t be a recurring thing-”

“Not Wendy’s, Eds, what kind of romantic do you take me for?”

Recognition dawns on Eddie’s face, but she presses her lips together in the attempt to hide her very blatant smile and shakes her head. “None, actually.”

“None!”

“There’s not a romantic bone in your body.”

Richie starts giggling, and rushes off the couch to run up to Eddie and grab her hand, beaming like a fucking idiot and swinging their arms a little. “I made reservations for your favorite at five. Ten whole months, baby!”

“You dweeb,” Eddie mumbles, but leans in and indulges Richie with a sweet kiss anyway. Richie tries to go back in for more, other hand cupping Eddie’s jaw and drawing her close again, but Eddie pushes her chest with a flat palm and gives her a look. “Don’t push it, I have work.”

Richie pouts, manages to sneak one more peck onto Eddie’s lips, and darts back with her hands up. “You’re free to go, madam!”

“I hate you so much.” Eddie’s still smiling when she rolls her eyes and retreats to her office.

Richie sighs, her hand flying to her chest as her heart throbs, and near floats to the kitchen where her laptop is charging. She’s still giggling to herself and smiling like a punch drunk moron as she googles flights to Bangor, and thinks really, this is such an upgrade from the last time she did this shit. She can faintly hear the click of Eddie’s keyboard down the hall, the fan she almost permanently has going on her desk just for white noise so she can focus. Richie swears she could fucking burst from how warm and whole it makes her feel.

She’s about to buy the round trip tickets from Los Angeles to Bangor when there’s a rushed pattering noise coming from down the hall, and suddenly there are hands on her shoulders as Eddie leans over and kisses her cheek quickly, lingering just long enough to catch Richie’s startled and permamently starstruck gaze and say, “I love you.”

Richie grins, tilts her chin up a little beseechingly, and with a short little laugh Eddie kisses her quickly. “I love you, too.”

Yeah, this is much fucking better than last time, Richie thinks. Ten out of fucking ten.

-

And yet, for some reason, arriving in Bangor still makes her fucking sick. 

This time she calls her dad when the plane lands. “Yeah, we’re having another little Losers Club meeting,” she tells him as she near runs after Eddie’s ridiculous power walking- she’s taller than Eddie, how the fuck is that little demon so fast- “Stanley Uris- remember him?- couldn’t make it last time, so we’re doing it again! I mean, we saw him for Thanksgiving, but he hasn’t been to Derry since… like, '91? So we said we’d meet up with him, cause like, it’s summer, why not?”

“Tell him I said hello,” Went laughs. 

Richie smiles, slowing down when they reach the luggage claim and leaning a little on her carry on rolling suitcase, hoping the handle doesn’t collapse under the weight- it does. “While we’re here, uh… I was wondering? I mean, if you… I’m sure you’re busy, but-”

“How long are you staying?”

“Our flight out is Monday morning,” Richie answers.

A pause. “Well, I don’t work on the weekends,” Went offers. “If you’d like to come by, we won’t be up to anything special.” He pauses, and chuckles. “Naomi would love to meet you.”

“Say no more,” Richie says instantly, giggling a little. “I need to meet the pit bull. Like, I love you, dad? But the dog is the priority here.”

“You know, I have to agree with you. How could I ever compete with those sweet little eyes!” 

“Tell her I said hi!” she demands. She falters, joins Eddie in pulling her suitcase off the rolling oval of luggage. “Tell Claudia I said hi, too.”

She and Claudia still haven’t really talked, but there’s less… tension, and Richie counts it as progress. It’s at least a start.

“I will.” She can hear the smile in his voice, and smiles, too.

“I’ll call you later, alright?” Richie says. “We’re staying at the Holiday Inn here, uh, probably gonna spend tonight… asleep, I’m always exhausted after flights, and tomorrow we’re going to Derry, so maybe Saturday or Sunday?”

“Just let me know, kiddo,” Went agrees. “I’ll talk to you later, Rich.”

“Alright, love you, dad.”

“Love you, too. Bye.”

“Bye.” And she hangs up.

As they fast walk out of the airport, Richie bumps Eddie’s elbow with her own and says, “Wanna visit the Tozier household with me this weekend?”

Eddie’s brows skyrocket, but she nods a little. “If you want me to come, sure. Of course.”

“Cool,” she says. Then in a joking whisper, she adds, “I mostly just wanna meet the dog.”

“You know what, I really can’t blame you. That dog is adorable.” Went has sent her about a trillion pictures of Naomi, the five year old rescue pitty, of which Richie has shown Eddie all of them. 

“We should get a dog,” Richie blurts out, but she doesn’t take it back. She’s always loved dogs. The Toziers had a tiny mutt named Gizmo when she was a kid, and she loved that dog to fucking death. He’d died with a million health issues when Richie was a sophomore in high school, and they’d never gotten another dog, but not for lack of Richie trying. 

Eddie looks a little skeptical, but surprisingly considerate. “The house is kind of small for anything bigger than, like, a beagle.”

“We should get a _beagle_!” Richie gasps.

“Richie.” She bites her lip and looks at Eddie with the best puppy dog eyes she can muster. “I’m not saying no dog. I’m saying either we find a bigger place, or we get a small dog.”

Richie swallows hard. A bigger place. She’s wanted to move out of LA since she moved there to begin with. Shit. They can go _anywhere_.

Clearly Eddie can see the gears turning, because she rolls her eyes fondly and says, “We’ll talk about it after, okay?”

“I’m holding you to that, Spaghetti,” she murmurs, still smiling. “I want a dog so bad now.”

They make it to the hotel in mostly one piece. Richie’s still daydreaming about dogs when Eddie unlocks the door and they rush inside single file, Richie immediately plopping her suitcase on the left side of the bed and sitting on the corner of the mattress. Eddie shrugs off her light hoodie and digs through her carry on backpack with familiar intense concentration, and Richie can’t help but stare. She always looks so fucking cute, cute, _cute_ with her frustrated eyes and firmly set lips under her choppy black-brown bob, and those cute fucking pastel polos, like the soft blue one she’s wearing now-

It looks a lot like the one she wore last time. It looks a lot like the one she saw when Eddie got run through her chest with a fucking massive spider claw in a decrepit sewer pit and died in her arms and Richie’s going to throw up right now. 

By some fucking miracle of the universe Richie bolts to the bathroom and throws the toilet seat open just in time to empty her guts into it. All she’d had on the airplane was a tiny bag of stale Cheez-Its and a bottle of Diet Coke that made Eddie grimace at her and mumble about her teeth rotting and kidney stones, so it’s mostly phlegm, and it burns. She flushes the toilet. It’s not as bad as the vision replaying ad infinitum in her head. 

“Richie?!” she hears Eddie repeating over and over in this frightened whisper that makes her feel worse, but apparently her guts are done forcing their way out of her body through her mouth, because she just sits on the floor with her head in her hands and shakes. “Hey, are you okay? Let me get you some water.”

“No,” Richie yells, her head snapping up and hands flying out to grab Eddie’s arms and yank her closer. Eddie ends up scooting over on her knees, looking terrified. “Don’t go.”

“Richie, you just threw up, let me get you some water-”

“I need you right now,” Richie whispers, shamelessly pleading. The fight drains from Eddie immediately, and she sits back on her heels, sliding her arms away just to grab Richie’s hands in her own and squeeze them reassuringly. “I need you, Eds.”

They just sit there for a moment, Richie staring at their hands and reminding herself that Eddie’s alive, Eddie’s here, Eddie’s okay, and that didn’t happen, while Eddie runs her thumbs over the backs of Richie’s hands soothingly. Richie can’t quite breathe very well yet, but at least she’s not crying. Yet.

“What is it?” Eddie asks.

Richie’s grip on Eddie’s hands tightens. “I don’t know. I didn’t think I’d get like this again, this time, you know…” She sucks in a shuddery breath, lets it out in a heavy sigh. “The last time we were here you almost died.”

Without a word, Eddie crawls over and seats herself right in Richie’s lap, arms landing around Richie’s neck with her forearms resting on Richie’s shoulders. Her head goes straight to the crook of Eddie’s neck as she runs her fingers gently through Richie’s hair. Richie clings. 

“I’m here,” Eddie whispers, and Richie believes her. “I’m alive. We made it out together, alright? And we’re going to do that again.” She draws back and tilts Richie’s head up to look at her. Eddie’s worried eyes are tearing up. Richie’s positive her breath smells like vomit, she literally just threw up, and she’s never loved Eddie Kaspbrak more. “You saved my life, Richie. The shit you saw didn’t happen because you saved my life. You brave motherfucker.”

That gets Richie crying. Her eyes fall shut and she breathes, and the tears slip free, and Eddie’s still here, a solid weight in her lap. She cries, and she breathes, and she’s okay.

“You good?” Eddie asks when Richie’s breath starts to even out where it’s hitting her neck again.

Richie nods. “I think so.”

“Good. Now let me get you some water so you can brush your teeth and we can make out, because I know that always makes you feel better.”

Richie freezes. Then she lifts her head to really look at Eddie, her vaguely worried eyes, the determined set of her lips, and says what she’s thinking. “I’m so fucking in love with you.”

Eddie rolls her eyes and shuffles out of Richie’s lap with a snort. “Dumbass.” She stands up and offers her a hand, adding, “I love you, too.”

-

Driving to Derry with another person is fucking weird. The only thing weirder is knowing why it’s weird.

Eddie drives, because whether she’ll admit it or not she’s nervous, and Richie knows she’s nervous, and that driving will take her mind off of it. Also because if there’s one gay stereotype that doesn’t apply to Eddie Kaspbrak, it’s the inability to drive. Eddie Kaspbrak can parallel park like it’s nothing which, frankly, is wildly intimidating to Richie. 

Richie loves her so fucking much.

They meet at a little 50’s themed diner further in town this time just to shake things up. Stanley has been there for a while, and when they arrive, only Ben, Beverly, and Mike have beat them to it. 

“Hey, Trashmouth!” Beverly greets with a hug. “Hi, Dr. K.”

“That’s so fucking old,” Eddie complains, but she’s grinning. 

They join the table and order burgers- Eddie’s well done with no cheese, and Richie’s… everything. Bill turns up last and scores the seat next to Mike, pretending to look sheepish.

“My agent wanted a few more edits this afternoon, and it took longer than I thought.”

Richie rolls her eyes. “Oh, boo-hoo, you’re rich and famous and finally figured out how to write an ending.” 

Bill flips her off. Richie sticks her tongue out at him.

It’s really fucking nice. 

This time around, it’s Stan who raises his glass of Dr. Pepper. “A toast,” he says as he looks around the table with that mix of fondness and distress he mastered at thirteen. “To the Losers.”

“To the Losers, baby!” Richie echoes, and they clink glasses at the center.

Conversation flows pretty normally, which, to Richie’s horror, makes her nervous. It’s not like she’s never had dinner with her friends before. And it’s a nice dinner, even. 

But a nice dinner in Derry? Now that shit’s unheard of, and sounds fake as hell.

The food arrives and the table quiets while they eat, with little interjections continuing conversations in between bites. It’s not the time to say it, but Richie really feels like if she doesn’t, she’ll fucking explode.

“Does this feel really fucking weird to anyone else?” she asks before she can really think about it. The table silences. Richie takes a large sip of her beer. “Sorry, I just can’t… stop thinking about it. This is weird, right?”

“You didn’t have to come if you didn’t want to,” Stanley says evenly.

Richie shakes her head fast, a frustrated noise slipping as she grips her beer tightly. “No, it’s not like that. It’s just…” She looks around the table frantically, fighting to gather her thoughts into something remotely coherent. “It’s like, after everything we’ve been through, we’re just… having a nice dinner. In Derry.”

The calculated mask on Stan’s face drains. There’s a hand on Richie’s where it’s shaking on the table, and she glances at Eddie, pursed lips curled just slightly. She looks back to Stan, who nods at her. “Yeah.”

“It feels too good to be true,” Beverly whispers. Richie stares down at the table.

The table goes quiet again, halfhearted bites and soft interjections of desperate small talk muted and understandably hopeful. It’s not that Richie wanted to think about it, but this is Derry. It’s all she can think about. 

The checks start coming, and when the waitress leaves, Stan says, “Let’s go to Neibolt.” All eyes are on him. Stan just shrugs, looking perfectly cool, but his voice is higher and thinner, not quite shaking, but getting there. “You already knew I wanted to go. And we already feel like shit, so why not get it over with now? Richie said it herself, this is weird.” He pauses, clenching the bill and debit card in his hand. “Yeah, I can imagine it’s weird. You know what’s weirder? Coming back for the first time without the knowledge that It’s dead, that I saw it die, that the house is gone like our scars are. I couldn’t bring myself to go when I got here.” Stan takes a deep breath. “I need to go.”

“Alright,” Bill says, and stands. So it’s pretty much settled. “Let’s go.”

Richie stands up and salutes. “Onward, Stan the Man!”

“Beep beep,” Stan mutters, but it’s heatless. 

“That is not the worst thing I’ve said tonight and you know it.”

“Yeah, well let’s not get worse,” Eddie teases under her breath.

The Losers leave the diner bickering.

-

They walk to Neibolt Street for old time’s sake. It still makes Richie feel like a little kid, but there’s a weird, fluttering calmness beneath her unshakable nerves that this street rattles within her more than the whole rest of Derry combined. She fucking hates this place, and she always will.

The Losers cluster together while they walk. It’s hot and sticky and very blatantly summer weather outside, and huddling only makes Richie sweat more than she already is, but she does feel like if she breaks away from the group for more than a second she’ll fucking combust. So she grabs Eddie’s hands and interlocks their fingers, but unlike last time, she doesn’t feel like she’s walking into an open and waiting grave. 

There’s a barbed wire fence around the empty plot of dirt where a condemned, decrepit crackhouse used to be. There’s nothing in it- nothing but dirt, a few stray weeds, and the “ _NO TRESPASSING_ ” sign on the fence. The Losers stop at the very front, where the iron wrought gate used to open on its own, leading to the rotting steps up the porch to an open wooden door, into a house that held nothing but dusty, broken furniture, and a well in the basement that led to the sewers. 

None of that is there now. The ground swallowed it up with their scars last year. 

Stanley Uris burst into tears. 

Immediately the group is on him, huddling even closer until it’s more or less one giant adult group hug, with Stanley sobbing into his hands at the center of it all. Richie distantly thinks it’s definitely someone else’s turn to be the blubbering mess, but for fucking once she doesn’t say a word. She holds Stanley while he cries. She might tear up a little, but it’s out of relief- a deep, visceral feeling of relief she feels down in her bones that makes her shake and bury her head in the back of Stan’s shoulder and hold her friends tighter. 

Seven grown adults who unironically call themselves losers hold each other and cry in front of an empty plot of dirt on Neibolt Street that night- but for the record, it’s not the weirdest thing that’s ever happened in Derry, Maine. 

-

They don’t stop there.

The trek to the clubhouse is Bill’s idea. It’s not a bad one, even though it’s getting dark out pretty soon and that does creep Richie out a lot, given the fact that it’s Derry, but she goes along with it. One hand is still clinging to Eddie’s firmly. The other is gripping Stanley’s forearm and holding him close, because he’s definitely trying to act like he’s not shaking anymore, but he is physically shaking. Which is fair. She holds him tighter. 

“This is so much fucking better than last time,” Richie groans when she lands on the dirt floor, dusting off her hands on her jeans. “Hey, Stan, look, your weird ass shower caps stood the test of time!”

“Wonderful,” Stanley deadpans. 

Richie throws one at him for good measure, just to see him scowl at her. That’s more like it. “Hey, you don’t want the spiders to get you!”

“The others appreciated my shower caps.”

“We still do,” Eddie tells him, rolling her eyes. Richie laughs.

“I don’t!”

“I don’t see where I asked, Richie.”

Richie seats herself on a lone wooden stool wearing a shit eating grin. “But you love me for it!”

Stan falls silent. He braces himself on one of the old wooden supports, then immediately thinks better of it and steps back, folding his arms. “I do,” he says softly. “All of you.” He looks around the old clubhouse with a small, wary smile. “I couldn’t have done this without you.”

“Always, Stanley,” Ben says genuinely, the fucking angel. 

“You guys are my best friends,” Stan continues. His hands clench a little where they’re rested on his arms. “I still hate that It… I swore I’d never fall out of touch with you guys, we wouldn’t grow apart, we’d still be friends. I knew most people didn’t keep in touch with their childhood friends but… it’s always been different for us, hasn’t it?”

Richie huffs a short, humorless laugh. “It’s the childhood trauma.”

The Losers ignore that, which is fair. 

“We made an oath,” Mike says, stepping toward Stan and resting a hand on his shoulder. “We fought a monster together. That’s the kind of thing that bonds you for life, I think.”

Stan nods, now more or less staring into the middle distance as he speaks. “I don’t think I’ll ever not feel guilty about making you guys fight It without me.”

“Stan, you didn’t _make_ us-” Bill tries. 

“I should’ve been there,” he steamrolls over Bill’s interjection. “I wish I’d been braver, I hate thinking of you guys fighting that… that _thing_ , but when you called me, I remembered how it _did_ feel to fight that thing. And it’s all I could think about the entire time, that entire week until you visited, even knowing that… you did it.” He pauses, staring straight down at the ground. “I’ll never stop feeling guilty about that. I was always so scared of being left down there alone, and I just… I did exactly that. To my best fucking friends.” He looks up then, glances around the group with misty eyes. Richie’s throat constricts painfully. “But god, I am _so_ glad that fucking clown is dead.”

Richie can’t help it- she laughs. Apparently it was a good impulse to have, because the whole group follows suit until they’re on the dirty floor giggling like fucking maniacs. Stan’s crying again, but he’s laughing, too, and briefly Richie sees the very serious thirteen year old boy in button down shirts and khaki shorts who never quite seemed like he was really thirteen, like he was born a bitter old man, and she smiles wetly at him. 

“We love you, Stan,” she says. 

Stan barrells her into a hug, and the sudden movement chokes a laugh out of her. “You’re the most annoying person I’ve ever met, and I can’t stand you,” he snorts. “But for some unforseeable reason I love you, too.”

Richie grins. “Aw, Stanford! That’s so sweet.”

“I regret saying it already.”

“Nope, it’s too late!” Richie crows, immediately busting up into another fit of giggles at Stan’s half amused, half horrified expression. “You’re never living that shit down, man! Did you know Patty told me you think I’m funny? Cause you’re never living _that_ shit down, either!”

Stan wipes a hand over his face and groans. “I’ve created a monster.”

“She was already a monster,” Eddie mumbles, but she’s smiling, too.

“You all love me!” Richie cries between bursts of laughter. “But do you _like_ like me?”

Eddie wrestles her to the ground and launches into a rant about her dumb fucking trash mouth, and Richie keeps laughing. It’s really like they’re kids again, only this time Eddie kisses her cheek afterwards and blushes, which definitely wouldn’t have happened in the 80’s.

Richie can't stop fucking smiling.

-

Moving is fucking stressful. On the bright side, it’s not LA, so Richie thinks she can deal.

The worst part of it is really that Eddie _insists_ they wait at least a month before visiting an animal shelter to look for a dog. Logically, Richie understands that yeah, they need a little time to settle in first, unpack their shit- including the boxes that Richie will still be unpacking well into the next year and everyone knows it- and if they visit a shelter just to peruse, they will come home with a dog because Richie has zero fucking self control. 

She gets it. But that doesn’t mean she likes it. 

So she waits, and when November rolls around, they bring home the most handsome boy Richie’s ever met, a husky mix- a muttsky, Richie declares- named Zephyr who owns her whole heart, or at least the parts that Eddie somehow doesn’t, but that’s not saying much. Surely they can split it. 

Richie goes fucking ham with dog supplies. They get their boy the fluffiest dog bed at Petco, a billion toys because they aren’t sure what he likes to play with yet, every single dog treat made for dogs his size, and three bags of dry food. It’s excessive, and Eddie tells her as much.

Eddie, for what it’s worth, doesn’t make any attempts to stop her from buying the three bags of dry food. 

The Losers meet Zephyr over Skype that week. “I think I may love your dog more than you,” Beverly tells them while ogling over him. 

“That’s fair,” Richie says with a shrug. “He’s very good.”

“Best boy,” Eddie assures Zephyr, ruffling the coarse fur on the top of his head. “Only boy I’ve ever loved.”

“Thanks, Eds,” Bill laughs.

“Bill, I’m a lesbian.”

“What, are you in love with your dog?”

“No,” Eddie sighs. “I do love him more than any of you, though, so there’s that.”

“More than Richie?” Mike asks through a snort.

Eddie looks at Richie, as if considering, and shrugs. “Pretty much, yeah.”

That gets her shoved off the couch. Eddie falls onto the carpet laughing, and scrambles back up just to steal Richie’s glasses and run away with them, a barking Zephyr following her excitedly, having _no_ fucking clue what’s going on. Richie abandons her laptop on the coffee table to chase them down the hall and upstairs, where Eddie sprints to the other side of their bed in hysterics, holding Richie’s glasses behind her back.

“Give them back, you little turd!”

“Make me!” Eddie challenges in a high pitched squeak.

Richie shrugs, then darts around the bed to grab Eddie’s face- gently, even though they’re roughhousing like fucking stupid teen boys- and kiss her soundly. She immediately shuts up, arms dropping to her sides still clenched in fists. Richie’s hands slide down Eddie’s arms to fiddle with them. No glasses. She whines into the kiss because she knows what that does to Eddie, who predictably grabs the front of her ugly Hawaiian shirt and yanks her closer. Richie slips her hands down Eddie’s back and slides them into her pockets, fingers curling around her glasses, and she immediately pulls back with a shit eating grin.

“I win,” she says breathlessly, as if she even remembers what game she’s so proud of winning. She puts her glasses back on with haste and immediately dives back in for more. 

Zephyr is circling them, yapping, because of course he doesn’t understand what’s happening, and Eddie does shove Richie away with an annoyed sigh, giving her a stern look. “We’re finishing the call,” Eddie says seriously, leaving no room to argue. “And then we’re gonna feed Zephyr and play with him in the backyard for at least fifteen minutes, so he’s tired and takes a nap. And then I’m gonna fuck your brains out.”

Richie’s jaw drops, and quickly snaps back up. She swallows dryly and salutes. “Ma’am, yes, ma’am.”

Snickering, Eddie gives her another kiss. “Dweeb,” she murmurs. She grabs Richie’s hand and yanks her along downstairs, and really, Richie already knew Eddie was it for her, but if she hadn’t already had that revelation this probably would’ve done it for her. 

Eddie makes sure to look incredibly disappointed when she sits back down in front of the laptop. Richie cannot stop grinning, because Bill was kind of right, and she’s a bad fucking actress when it comes to Eddie Kaspbrak.

“We get it, you’re in love,” Stan complains.

Richie just laughs, leaning over to rest her head in the crook of Eddie’s neck. “Yeah, I am.” Ben and Mike aw at her. Eddie flicks her nose. Bill makes some choice gagging noises. Beverly just winks.

She can get used to this. 


End file.
